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.