The Movie Database Support
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Some HTML entities are escaped in movie overview field.
posted by letterboxdSTAFFMOD on December 9, 2013 at 4:52 PM
The overview for If you build it has an "&" character in it. The character is encoded as an HTML entity in the JSON API:
"A year in the life of one of America's most innovative classrooms where students design & build to transform their hometown community. The film follows Emily Pilloton and Matt Miller as they teach the fundamentals of design, architecture and construction to a class of high school juniors in rural North Carolina."
The overview for Shaapit also has an "&" character in it. The character is not encoded as an HTML entity in the JSON API:
"The story of a girl who is trapped in a generational curse, which does not allow her love & marriage and her lover who vows to conquer this curse."
There's no mention of this field containing HTML or XML in the API documentation, and I believe there are no movies with either "<" or "<" in the overview. There are many films with "&" and many more with "&".
Is this intentional, or maybe the result of a change in the data entry interface? Is there a recommendation for how to treat & in the overview field? Is it possible to "clean" this data?
Reply by Travis Bell
on December 9, 2013 at 5:21 PM
Hey Matthew,
We already do strip HTML and XML entities from the overview field and it should not contain such entities. It could be related to some changes but I'm not sure to be honest. This is the first I've heard of it. Since we're supposed to be doing this and there are some present obviously everything isn't quite working the way it should.
It should be possible to clean them up but truthfully, we're about to embark on some stuff that I won't have time to take a break from for a few weeks. I've created a new ticket and will look into it when I get a chance.
Reply by letterboxd
on December 9, 2013 at 5:48 PM
Cool. I can fix it at our end. Humorously, the forum software you're using is aggressively unescaping entities as well :-) I hope you can tell that I meant & in some of the places where the original post has just &...
Reply by Travis Bell
on December 9, 2013 at 5:58 PM
Cool, ya. I haven't looked at this code for probably 3 years, you wouldn't believe the crap people paste in!
P.S. Here on the forums, you can use markdown's tilde to escape blocks of text to be literal words, i.e.
or&.Cheers.
Reply by letterboxd
on December 9, 2013 at 6:02 PM
Ah. Thanks for that tip! Yes, copy/paste is the source of all evil :-)
Reply by caprica6
on February 2, 2014 at 3:26 PM
Here's another example in case it helps: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/107