AWC apostrophe in nickname problem with PMs

I don't know if this can be solved or not, but nicknames with the ' symbol -the apostrophe- can't receive PMs, and neither with &. Nicknames with quotation marks (") are catastrophic: when someone sends a PM to them, the whole AWC stops working, the chat stops refreshing, and it stops showing the messages.
There are a very few nicknames with " symbol, but the apostrophe is MUCH used, and they can't change it -Surnames like D'allessandro, or so-
Thanks for helping!

Wait, aren't those special characters that aren't allowed in usernames anyway?

Hum... they are allowed, half of my forum has special characters in they usernames... The problem is that the AWC chat tabs use the username to distinguish from each one of them. That makes it have conflicts with the javascript, because the ", ', & symbols and so are used for programming it. I know it could be solved from one side, making the code turn the characters into the html code -the ones which start with &- but the code that distinguish the different tabs would enter in conflict anyways, because it can't send the text you input to the specific username, it would sent it for example to... "Robert &#39 ;n&#39 ; son" instead of "Robert n' son"...

I'll get this fixed in a big fix version soon, thanks for letting me know the issue.

I would absolutely recommend blocking commas "," in usernames however.

Hmm...well I know in the English version of phpBB 3 people can't use those characters. Maybe it's different in other languages.

Those are codes for characters, like how "&nbsp ;" (no spaces) is for a non-breaking space. In my experience they happen when there's an encoding issue.

I for one would recommend not using special characters in usernames at all, but maybe other languages they're more necessary.

They are called HTML entities and they don't occur from encoding issues. They are symbolized representations of special characters when you can't use the character... an example would be the exact reason this thread spawned.

As I say I'm fixing a few other bugs in AWC as well, before I update it, hopefully I can sort this issue.

Ah okay. So this is what happens when something doesn't stop a person from using illegal characters.

If it doesn't support those characters and they use them anyway then it will come out like that.

I've used a lot of websites where they have these problems it places like description boxes.


I thought maybe this happens when something didn't support Unicode. Then again that's silly because even ASCII supports these.