Why do I keep seeing this in post titles &

It keeps showing up on desktop and my phone.

  • gramie@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Fun fact: the character "&" was a way of writing the Latin word "et", and used to be known as "per se and", meaning "the word 'and' itself".

    When reciting the alphabet, people would say, "…x, y, z, and per se, and".

    Over time, "and per se, and" got shortened to "ampersand".

    • beckerist@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Technically it's the HTML markup for &. When publishing the title it stores it as

      & amp; (with no space)

      and the browser interprets it as & but when a bot posts it elsewhere it reads and reproduces the entire string as plain text. Would take a single function to fix the bot.

      edit: Lemmy keeps interpreting the markup as just & lol

    • Mac@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      It was a bug that was fixed in 0.19 (so the instances that haven't upgraded yet will still have people from them writing amp but the ones that have wont)

      For example I can type & fine

    • CaptainBlagbird@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Could also be the client (–> app) encoding it that way when the user creates a post. Then the Lemmy server just takes it as is and provides it to clients unchanged. The original app would probably decode it again and show it normally to the user, while other apps like OP's might not do it.

      I don't know much about web development and nothing about the code of Lemmy or the apps, this is just how I assumed it happens.

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    It's a problem I encountered before noting that Satan sold me at 12 with Dungeons & Dragons and Rock-&-Roll. (At the time Jesus was offering the Peacekeeper ICBM, so not as good a résumé)

    Anyway, I kept noticing my ampersands were changing, so I now just switch to Unicode alternatives which aren't replaced.

  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I know I've had trouble typing out these characters, < > (the first often showed up as '& lt;') probably to prevent code execution. It's an HTML replacement of the character.