Well, that's OK, but I think that some obvious way to reach the subject should exist, like for example adding a link 'Login' or something to the sidemenu.

Thanks for attention

The very first attempt to post messages containing cyrillic symbols has ended up into text, consisting of ampersands followed by symbol codes.

After viewing the posting HTML-source, the problem has been detected. The blog engine doesn't seem to convert "& a m p ;" escape sequences back to ampersands before returning the posting text to user.

Here's an excerpt therefrom:

<div class="blogentrybody">
<p>&amp;#1055;&amp;#1088;&amp;#1080;&amp;#1082;&amp;#1088;&amp;#1091;&amp;#1090;&amp;#1080;&amp;#1083;. &amp;#1059;&amp;#1089;&amp;#1090;&amp;#1072;&amp;#1085;&amp;#1086;&amp;#1074;&amp;#1080;&amp;#1083;. &amp;#1047;&amp;#1072;&amp;#1087;&amp;#1091;&amp;#1089;&amp;#1090;&amp;#1080;&amp;#1083;. &amp;#1056;&amp;#1072;&amp;#1073;&amp;#1086;&amp;#1090;&amp;#1072;&amp;#1077;&amp;#1090;.</p></div>
<div class="blogentryfooter">

Thanks in advance

Sorry, again.

function bbcodeToHTML(...)

...
$patterns[19] = "/&amp;/Usi";
...
$replacements[19] = '&';

And everything worked just fine.

Thanks for all your feedback! The translation of ampersands in Unicode HTML entities is not a bug - it works that way by design. Posting in LBCode mode isn't *supposed* to allow HTML entities because the entire point of LBCode is to give non-technical users a simpler markup language. The idea is that the user can type in pretty much any text he wants and it will be displayed as he typed it. This includes typing in HTML code and having it displayed as the code.

If you need to use HTML code in your post, then try using the "allow HTML markup" mode for your post. This "raw HTML" mode will leave your code completely untouched, so Unicode won't be a problem. Of course, you'll have to enter line breaks and paragraphs manually, and there are still some issues with the preview mode, so it's not a perfect compromise. Although, if you're writing entire posts in Unicode, I'm assuming you use an HTML editor rather than type all the escape sequences manually, so that probably isn't an issue. (That reminds me - I've had the "new post from uploaded file" feature on the TODO list for a while now. Maybe that would be a good compromise.

In fact, I just switch into Cyrillic keyboard layout and type message text. And the effect is, as follows. A far as I can figure out, the engine converts cyrillic symbols into escape-sequences. Then the ampersands in escape-sequences are in turn also converted into escape-sequences. And then the stuff is stored in XML-file. When in goes to rendering the posting, the engine just takes the raw contents of the appropriate field in XML-file and places it into HTML-output, and example of which has been shown before in my posting at 2005-10-09 23:58 CDT.

I'll type now some text in Russian for you to show the effect, before I've applied that expedient solution.

"&#1055;&#1088;&#1086;&#1073;&#1072; &#1088;&#1091;&#1089;&#1089;&#1082;&#1086;&#1075;&#1086;", &#1095;&#1090;&#1086; &#1087;&#1086;-&#1072;&#1085;&#1075;&#1083;&#1080;&#1081;&#1089;&#1082;&#1080; &#1079;&#1085;&#1072;&#1095;&#1080;&#1090; "Probe of Russian"

That's why I was saying my solution was expedient. For I don't know the whole inside of your software.

I'm not set up to type Cyrillic characters, but I was able to copy and paste some into a form field. It appears that PHP's htmlentities() is trying to convert the raw Unicode characters into escape sequences and doing a pretty bad job of it. However, there also seems to be an issue with how the text is encoded when it is sent to the server, as Opera and Konqueror are giving me different encoding when I view the source. Konqueror is showing all numeric encodings, like you posted, but Opera is showing my symbolic encodings, like &ETH;&Ntilde;&ETH;&frac34;. If you don't mind my asking, what browser and character encoding are you using?

It looks like this will especially be an issue with comments. For blog posts, the author can simply revert to HTML mode, as previously noted. However, for comments, I don't think it's a good idea to allow raw HTML code in them, but I'm not sure of another good way to sanitize user input without htmlentities(). I think this one is going to take some time, meaning I can't promise it will be fixed in version 0.4.0, although I may include a work-around of some kind.

Concerning encodings. Before entering a text of blog post or comment I tried to switch browser to different Cyrillic character codings. And in all cases Cyrillic characters were treated as if they were Unicode characters. The results varied from encoding to encoding (because character codes do not coincide in different encodings). The common thing was that in case of every encoding the characters were converted to escape-sequences; and unlike the case of "HTML markup" in the cases of "BB markup" or "auto markup" these escape-sequences were stored in XML-file with ampersands converted into escape-sequences (&amp;), too.

I'd say, that I wouldn't concentrate too much on correct handling of encodings, but I'd pay the main attention to the fact, that in cases of "BB markup" and "Auto markup" the ampersands in escape-sequences standing for some character (for example, the escape-sequence &#1072;) are being in turn converted to &amp; before they are stored in XML-file.

In case of "HTML markup" the ampersand is kept untouched.

By default, LnBlog will now use htmlspecialchars() for escaping user entered text in LBCode and auto-markup modes. This translates only a very limited subset of possible HTML entities and does not include Unicode characters. When the above mentioned constant is enabled, it will revert to htmlentities() with a regular expression that unescapes the ampersand in numeric entieies.

This fix will be in version 0.4.0. It's not perfect, but at this point, I think it's better than nothing.