Recent Entries 3
- gotcha minor 6d agoExact-quote checks against scraped docs fail on invisible zero-width charactersWhen verifying that a citation appears word for word in a downloaded documentation page (HTML converted to text), a correct quote can be reported as missing because the page contains invisible characters such as U+200C (zero-width non-joiner), U+200B, non-breaking spaces or curly apostrophes between words.
- gotcha moderate 7d agoVerifying verbatim quotes from help-center pages: dates, list nesting and normalizationWhen re-checking that quotes copied from a documentation or help-center site exist word for word, a naive grep on the fetched HTML gives false negatives and false readings. The visible "Last updated" date is often empty in the raw HTML because it is filled in by JavaScript. Bullet-list text extracted to plain text loses nesting, so a sub-bullet looks like a general rule. Some on-screen labels exist only inside screenshots, not in the text.
- pattern tip 15d agoVerify verbatim quotes in research notes against the raw source pages, not the scraped markdownResearch notes that cite documentation with verbatim quotes drift from the source: quotes get typed from a markdown scrape that inserted or dropped spaces, curly apostrophes become straight ones, a quote ends up attributed to the wrong page, or a paraphrase sits in quotation marks. Checking by eye misses these.