Special chars escaped multiple times in field responses, but not in field names

This evening I posted a beta release which has a fix for the first problem. I’ve seen it before but it doesn’t always seem to happen so I have some concern about this being a general solution. I don’t think older style forms need it but new ones definitely do.

Give it a try and let me know if fixes #1. I haven’t had a chance to look at #2 yet.

WordPress Google Form v0.54 is now available.

Hi Mike,

I’m having the problem Peter describes in #1 as well. Would love to know if there’s a fix.

Thanks!
-Will

I have a beta build which fixes these sorts of problems, can you try it out and let me know if fixes yours?

You can find the beta build here.

Hey Mike, Thanks for the reply! I’d be happy to give that a shot. My form is live right now; is this a pretty stable beta? I’d rather just find/replace in my spreadsheet than have any other technical issues ??

Thanks!
-Will

Yes, it is stable. I was waiting to hear final confirmation from another user who had apostrophe characters in their radio button values. They changed their form before I got the beta complete but I am pretty confident it works correctly. I was thinking of just releasing this update as 40+ people have downloaded and I have not had any reports of problems.

Thanks, Mike. I’ve got it installed, but still having the weird characters show up. If you go here:

https://littleboxespdx.com/shop-registration/

and enter something with an ‘&’ in the name for the first field (business name), select a category, and then click Continue and then click Back on the 2nd page (to return to the first), you’ll see your ‘&’ has already been replaced with \u0026

Thanks!
-Will

Dealing with ampersand characters is for lack of a better word, a real pain. The ampersand is the special character that is used to pass parameters in URLs, all of the special HTML character codes have an ampersand. When to try and decode it and when not to is a real challenge.

If you leave it encoded, does the form work correctly?

I hear you, Mike.

If you leave it encoded, does the form work correctly?

Do you mean if I don’t click Back? Unfortunately not – it passes through to the spreadsheet even uglier ??

No big deal, I can just do some finding/replacing for the time being. Thanks a bunch for your help!

-Will

I had some time to look into the ampersand problem and believe I have a solution. It is only a problem, as far as I can tell, on multi-page forms. I have a solution for it in wpGForm v0.58-beta-2 if you would like to test it.

Works for me! Hard returns seem to still be a problem, but this is great! Thanks, Mike!

Do hard returns end up with a encoded value too? If so, what value? It may be a simple fix now that I know how to fix the ampersand.

yes! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\n is the value. Thanks, Mike.

I have a solution to the newline (aka hard return) problem that has been reported. You can find it in v0.58-beta-3. This beta release has addressed all issues I am aware of so unless something comes up, I will likely release v0.58 in the next day or so.

Hi Mike,

Just installed. Thanks for your help! I’ll keep you posted if I catch anything else.

all the best,
Will