Dashboard News & Events widget does not properly handle entities (e.g. en/em dash)

[nickciske]

"WordCamp Minneapolis – St. Paul, Minnesota, USA" is displayed as "WordCamp Minneapolis – St. Paul, Minnesota, USA"

[nickciske]

Screenshot of issue

[kpegoraro]

On Chrome on Windows, I see the same result for the Minneapolis event in the first screenshot from nickciske, but I do see em- and en-dashes and at-signs properly for other events (screenshots attached).

[kpegoraro]

Screenshot of at sign in WP News and Events

[kpegoraro]

WP News and Events em-dash example

[kpegoraro]

WP News and Announcements OK en-dash example screenshot

[iandunn]

I'm seeing this too. I haven't had time to really dig into it, but the – entity is returned by the w.org API, which seems appropriate at first glance.

My first guess would be that {{ is preventing the entity from being rendered. Running the data through htmlspecialchars_decode() before it gets returned from get_events() might be a good fix. I think that'd be safe, since it'd still be passed through {{, but we'd need to verify that.

[shedonist]

I think this issue may have been resolved by Meetup itself. I tried editing one of my future meetups (​https://www.meetup.com/WordpressDevSeacoast/events/243889267/ - on 1/11/18) to contain an endash or an emdash and it shows properly both in Meetup and also when I looked at it in the dashboard (search for "Nottingham") and the "Users — TBD" meetup shows fine.

Steps: What I did was paste the entity directly into the meetup title. Then I waited for the widget to refresh itself (I deleted my local transients, but it seems like Meetup or something up the chain was caching the titles for a bit). I am able to find my meetup at the moment by searching for "Nottingham" (this narrows the search so I can see further ahead to the Jan meetup). Once the updated "Users — TBD" title appeared in the widget, it was displaying correctly.

[iandunn]

#53851 was marked as a duplicate.

[Hareesh Pillai]

Adding it to the upcoming major milestone for consideration. A similar issue was faced recently with Santa Catarina - Brazil.

[sayedulsayem]

This is documented function of lodash to convert string from escaped string.

[sayedulsayem]

padrone me for my previous patch. This is the actual working solution

[sabernhardt]

From ticket:53851#comment:6 :

I agree w/ Jake about keeping the escaping, but ticket:41208#comment:2 might work.

[audrasjb]

Justr noting that the patch proposed above doesn't work in most case since unescape() only handles a small amount of entities (source: ​http://underscorejs.org/#unescape).

[audrasjb]

Sames goes for htmlspecialchars_decode (source: ​https://www.php.net/manual/fr/function.htmlspecialchars-decode.php).
I think we need to use html_entity_decode.

Trac ticket: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/41208

[audrasjb]

The above PR fixes the issue.

## How to test

Step 1: simulate the issue

Using the PR above, replace this line:
$event['title'] = html_entity_decode( $event['title'] );
with:
$event['title'] = 'test – testing' );

See that it displays the raw HTML entity on the dashboard.

Step 2: fix the issue

Now replace the line with:
$event['title'] = html_entity_decode( 'test – testing' );

See that it displays: test – testing.

[sabernhardt]

character codes showing before patch

[sabernhardt]

character codes decoded with patch

[sabernhardt]

For testing, I wanted to keep both the original code and the patch changes intact, so I edited the $events array immediately at the beginning of the trim_events() function. (The PR diff applied changes around this.)

$events[0]['title'] = '“test – testing” …';
$events[1]['title'] = 'Users — TBD';
 $events[1]['type'] = 'wordcamp';
$events[2]['title'] = '« L’Événement » à Nîmes';

[audrasjb]

Thanks for testing @sabernhardt.
So according to your test case, I assume we're good to go with this patch?

[sabernhardt]

This patch probably is ready, though I did not add the commit keyword in case someone else would want to test additional characters and/or add feedback.

The only identified problems occur with the dash character codes, and the PR fixes those plus others (both numeric codes and entities).

[audrasjb]

Thanks @SergeyBiryukov, @ocean90, @sabernhardt for the review 👍

[audrasjb]

In 52608:

Administration: Properly handle HTML entities in the News & Events dashboard widget.

This change adds support for various HTML entities in the News & Events dashboard widget.

Props nickciske, kpegoraro, iandunn, shedonist, sayedulsayem, sabernhardt, audrasjb, SergeyBiryukov, ocean90.
Fixes #41208.

Committed in https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/52608