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The Lounge What is on Your Mind? Debugging Our Computer Science Trivia Feature Post 303040591 by Neo on Friday 1st of November 2019 09:21:04 AM
Old 11-01-2019
Debugging Our Computer Science Trivia Feature

Only a few days after I coded this new feature from scratch, we are seeing over 3000 entries in the database from members (mostly guests) playing CS trivia.

I have spend a lot of time coding this (from scratch) and testing the API. From the logs, it seems to have an API bug which appears about 5 times or less per thousand impressions, but I am not sure.

The bug seems to happen when there is some issue where the answer to a question in the Javascript is blank (on rare occasion) or there is a problem with the AJAX XHR request based on a network issue.

I have written a lot of "error trapping" code today to try to see exactly what causes this small bug.

If anyone sees any CS trivia statement and their T/F answer seems wrong, the issue is more-than-likely related to this rare bug, but then again, it could be a typo in the DB (or some strange HTML entity which was not encoded and decoded properly). So, if you do see anything which seems ODD, please take a screenshot of your screen and post it back here.

If you are a savvy at web dev, you can help out by opening your web dev console and inspecting the Javascript console and the Network XHR request and responses (and take a screen shot of any console errors and the XHR request / response).

Either way, if anyone want to help debug the API during the testing phase, the best way to debug is to answer a lot of questions, push NEXT and answer more. I have done this for the past two days for countless hours and I think I have trapped most network and AJAX issues, but I am sure there are more bugs, as there are always bugs in new code, without exception.

Please note that today one user from the Philippines answered over 100 questions. A lot of people worldwide are finding good value with this new feature so you can help me and help others by helping debug, so I can make sure all errors are trapped.

Thanks for help debugging.


Cheers!

Note: Code and other special chars must be encoded before they are submitted to the DB (for DB integrity) and I have written some special code to decode the HTML entities (in JS) but there are some occasional HTML entities (encodings) which are not decoded properly. If you see any of the HTML entities still encoded, please take a screen shot and post back so I can trap those and decode them as well. If you do not know what an HTML entity is, I have screen shots I can share Smilie
 

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HTML::Entities(3pm)					User Contributed Perl Documentation				       HTML::Entities(3pm)

NAME
HTML::Entities - Encode or decode strings with HTML entities SYNOPSIS
use HTML::Entities; $a = "Våre norske tegn bør &#230res"; decode_entities($a); encode_entities($a, "200-377"); For example, this: $input = "vis-a-vis Beyonce's naieve papier-mache resume"; print encode_entities($input), " " Prints this out: vis-à-vis Beyoncé's naïve papier-mâché résumé DESCRIPTION
This module deals with encoding and decoding of strings with HTML character entities. The module provides the following functions: decode_entities( $string, ... ) This routine replaces HTML entities found in the $string with the corresponding Unicode character. Unrecognized entities are left alone. If multiple strings are provided as argument they are each decoded separately and the same number of strings are returned. If called in void context the arguments are decoded in-place. This routine is exported by default. _decode_entities( $string, \%entity2char ) _decode_entities( $string, \%entity2char, $expand_prefix ) This will in-place replace HTML entities in $string. The %entity2char hash must be provided. Named entities not found in the %entity2char hash are left alone. Numeric entities are expanded unless their value overflow. The keys in %entity2char are the entity names to be expanded and their values are what they should expand into. The values do not have to be single character strings. If a key has ";" as suffix, then occurrences in $string are only expanded if properly terminated with ";". Entities without ";" will be expanded regardless of how they are terminated for compatibility with how common browsers treat entities in the Latin-1 range. If $expand_prefix is TRUE then entities without trailing ";" in %entity2char will even be expanded as a prefix of a longer unrecognized name. The longest matching name in %entity2char will be used. This is mainly present for compatibility with an MSIE misfeature. $string = "foo&nbspbar"; _decode_entities($string, { nb => "@", nbsp => "xA0" }, 1); print $string; # will print "foo bar" This routine is exported by default. encode_entities( $string ) encode_entities( $string, $unsafe_chars ) This routine replaces unsafe characters in $string with their entity representation. A second argument can be given to specify which characters to consider unsafe. The unsafe characters is specified using the regular expression character class syntax (what you find within brackets in regular expressions). The default set of characters to encode are control chars, high-bit chars, and the "<", "&", ">", "'" and """ characters. But this, for example, would encode just the "<", "&", ">", and """ characters: $encoded = encode_entities($input, '<>&"'); and this would only encode non-plain ascii: $encoded = encode_entities($input, '^ x20-x25x27-x7e'); This routine is exported by default. encode_entities_numeric( $string ) encode_entities_numeric( $string, $unsafe_chars ) This routine works just like encode_entities, except that the replacement entities are always "&#xhexnum;" and never "&entname;". For example, "encode_entities("rxF4le")" returns "r&ocirc;le", but "encode_entities_numeric("rxF4le")" returns "r&#xF4;le". This routine is not exported by default. But you can always export it with "use HTML::Entities qw(encode_entities_numeric);" or even "use HTML::Entities qw(:DEFAULT encode_entities_numeric);" All these routines modify the string passed as the first argument, if called in a void context. In scalar and array contexts, the encoded or decoded string is returned (without changing the input string). If you prefer not to import these routines into your namespace, you can call them as: use HTML::Entities (); $decoded = HTML::Entities::decode($a); $encoded = HTML::Entities::encode($a); $encoded = HTML::Entities::encode_numeric($a); The module can also export the %char2entity and the %entity2char hashes, which contain the mapping from all characters to the corresponding entities (and vice versa, respectively). COPYRIGHT
Copyright 1995-2006 Gisle Aas. All rights reserved. This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. perl v5.14.2 2011-10-15 HTML::Entities(3pm)
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