citeline bug

From: David R Karger <karger_at_MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:02:05 -0400

I've run into a citeline bug (which i can explain below). The
following bibtex field:

  confurl =
{http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=365411&dl=GUIDE&dl=ACM&type=proceeding&idx=SERIES422&part=Proceedings&WantType=Proceedings}

Is being converted to the following json in the data:
  
"confurl":"http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=365411&dl=GUIDE&dl=ACM&type=proceeding&idx=SERIES422∂=Proceedings&WantType=Proceedings",

The problem is the strange character after "SERIES422" in the json.
This is a rather amusing bug. The url in bibtex is intended to be
entered as-is as an http address. The converter is applying _html
special character formatting_ to the url, and transforming "&part" into
the special "partial derivative" character. I do not believe it is part
of the http (as opposed to html) spec to do special character
transformation. Even worse, this transformation should not occur even
under html semantics because the html special character semantics
requires a trailing semicolon: &part; . Worst of all, given that this
is a bibtex file coming in and not an html file, the whole notion of
special html character transformation doesn't make any sense!
Received on Fri Jun 12 2009 - 13:02:05 EDT

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