Truncating location when i'm in TaumatawhakatangihangakoauauoTamateahaumaitawhitiurehaeaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuak

Submitted by shiny on Thu, 06/24/2010 - 18:02

Issue ID:	2388
Issue Category:	bug
Component:	core
Priority:	minor
Status:	will not fix
Assigned:	Unassigned
Version:	0.9

I set my location to TaumatawhakatangihangakoauauoTamateahaumaitawhitiurehaeaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu, a location in the middle of North island New Zealand.

however on shiny.status.net, it gets truncated without any warning.
I believe this is a mysql flaw - if you insert a string that's longer than X into varchar(X), it'll silently truncate the string. Lots of unintended consequences.

Updates

#1

Submitted by Brion Vibber on Mon, 06/28/2010 - 10:16.

It looks like it's actually storing the whole thing; in the HTML source on http://shiny.status.net/ I see the full 105-character name:

TaumatawhakatangihangakoauauoTamateahaumaitawhitiurehaeaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu

however the text is cut off visually in the browser. It seems that most browsers won't actually force a line-break in a long word; depending on how the CSS style properties are set, it'll either push the document out horizontally so it fits (and you have to scroll in your window), extend horizontally outside its bounding box where it may overlap other things, or be cropped off. The style in place here seems to be cropping it: .entity_profile has 'overflow: hidden' and a width that's fixed to a percentage of its surroundings.

There's probably not really a _good_ solution here, but a couple possibilities off the top of my head:
* make it scroll (eww)
* explicitly trim very long words with ellipses (then you lose the data)
* silently insert word-break locations in the middle of very long words (last I checked, soft hyphenation points are not treated consistently by browsers; a no-width space might work but will be displeasing typographically :)