Early on while working on this PMS archiving thing, I ran into trouble with character encodings. I thought I'd fixed everything, by properly decoding from ISO-8859-1 and encoding into UTF-8. And then, tonight, I found the problem still existed. Lots of false starts later, I realized my mistake. You see, every page on GameFAQs contains the following tag:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
Naive fool that I was, I assumed that this meant every page was encoded in ISO-8859-1. Turns out that by "ISO-8859-1", a lot of brain-dead programmers mean "Windows-1252". In fact, HTML5 (trying its darnedest to earn a place on my list, no doubt) will make this insanity standard. Ugh.
On a happier note, GameFOX has been updated to work with the new URLs. Now let me include a quote and an em dash in this post to ensure my program is handling GFCode and characters outside of ISO-8859-1 correctly.
From: Mark Twain
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is really a large matter—it's the difference between a lightning bug and the lightning.
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The Albino Formerly Known as Mimir