Table Shortcode not formatting correctly

Hi,

thanks for your question, and sorry for the trouble.

That sounds really strange. Does this also happen when you directly type the extra parameter instead of copy/pasting it?
Can you create a before/after screenshot of the textfield where you are adding this parameter?

Regards,
Tobias

Hi again Tobias. Thanks for your reply.

I’ve created a Screen video that shows how it strips out spaces and characters as I’m typing and/or pasting them in. I would be glad to give you login credentials if that would help.

Here is a link to the video: https://www.screencast.com/t/WAhrQDV0f

Thanks again.

Hi,

thanks for the screen video!

From what I can see, you are making this change in the wrong place. The change has to be done on the page where you embedded the table, not on the table’s “Edit” screen.

So, somewhere in a post/page, you have [table id=1 /]. This is where you have to use the modified Shortcode.

Regards,
Tobias

Tobias, this fixed the issue. Thank you!

I have one other issue I’m hoping you can help with…

In my table, I have quotation marks and apostrophes that in some browsers are showing up as squares. we are using these to show dimensions, for example, 12 feet by 12 feet is shown as 12′ by 12′ or 12 inches is shown as 12″

I am thinking this is a font issue. Is there a way to change the font or otherwise correct this issue?

Many thanks!

Hi,

good to hear that this helped! ??

For the issue with the quotation marks: That sounds strange, and I’m not sure what might be causing that.
Are the quotation marks showing up correctly on the “Edit” screen?

Can you please post a link to the page with the table where this problem happens, so that I can take a direct look? Thanks!

Regards,
Tobias

Thanks so much for the quick response. I don’t think this is specifically a TablePress issue, but I figured perhaps you had seen it before and that perhaps some customer css code might fix it.

I think it may be related to fonts, because I see it fine on my computer in Chrome, but in Firefox on my computer it is not correct. And it appears wrong on my client’s computer in Chrome.

To be clear:
My computer/Chrome = Okay
Client computer/Chrome = not okay
My computer firefox = not okay

Here is a link to the Table where I’m seeing this: https://142.4.6.252/~lexingu2/generalrental/inventory/ (search the table for “canopy”),

and I have created a page with a screenshot in case you don’t see the issue on your computer: https://142.4.6.252/~lexingu2/generalrental/for-tobias/.

to be very straightforward, I can work around this by using “in.” and “ft.” instead of ” and ‘. So if this is out of your realm, I’m okay with it.

Thanks again.

Hi,

thanks for the example! This is actually broken for me as well (Chrome on Linux). I don’t see squares though, but “simple” emoji (like the head of an eagle, or a family holding hands).
This even happens when using “View source” in the browser, so that I don’t really think that this is a plain font issue.
However, I don’t really have an idea on what could be the cause…

Is this happening on the “Edit” screen of TablePress as well? Or when you use the “Preview” of the table (in the TablePress admin area)?

Regards,
Tobias

You asked, “Is this happening on the “Edit” screen of TablePress as well?” if you mean in the edit table where i can edit the columns and rows and upload photos to the table, no it is not happening on my computer in Chrome – the text in each table field looks normal.

But it IS happening in Firefox on my computer when looking at the code of each field.

“Or when you use the “Preview” of the table (in the TablePress admin area)?” Looks fine in chrome on my computer; but in Firefox and Safari, nothing shows up – not the ” or ‘ or the “emojis”…. So it just shows like this: White Canopy 15 X 15 rather than like this: White Canopy 15? X 15? (Although when I copied and pasted from Safari into this message it included the ” and ‘ Crazy.

I would be glad to give you login credentials if you would like to go in and look around. Just let me know. Thanks again.

Hi,

yes, that would be good. If possible, I’d like to take a direct look at this on your site. Could you therefore please create a temporary admin account for me and send me the details via email (the address is in the main plugin file “tablepress.php”)? That way, I can investigate this directly. Thanks!

And another question: How did you get all this data into the table? Was everything typed in manually (on the TablePress “Edit” screen), or was it imported from a file?

Regards,
Tobias

Hi,

Thanks for the email! I was able to log in and I think I found the cause:
The CSV file uses a character encoding of “Western (Windows 1252)” (which basically defines how to translate all those binary 0’s and 1’s into an actual character).
Now, WordPress and TablePress commonly use the encoding UTF-8 (which contains more characters, which is e.g. important for foreign alphabets and special characters).
I now assume that somewhere in the conversion, things broke, so that those ” and ‘ symbols (they are not these but very similar looking ones) where not showing correctly. There was probably no one-to-one match between the character encodings.
So, to fix this, I exported your table 1 to a CSV file and, in a text editor, replaced the broken characters with the correct ones.
I then imported that file as the new table 4 on your site.
It’s exactly the same as table 1, except for the fixed ‘ and “.

To potentially prevent this in the future, I recommend to take the CSV files that shall be imported, and open them in a text editor (Notepad should be fine).
Then, use “File” -> “Save as” and save them with the “UTF-8” character encoding. This will result in a proper conversion, so that everything should be fine after the ensuing import.

Regards,
Tobias