# Pictures in 1st class space



## chuck n (Jan 2, 2008)

Moderators:

When MLS was first migrated to the new server, I had no problem with putting a new picture into my web space and then posting it in a thread. Lately, I have uploaded at least 16 pictures into my web space. When I go into the web space they are there. The problem is that when I use the insert icon with the pencil they don't appear in the listing of available pictures. If I go to the insert icon without the pencil, they show up, but only as a small box with a question mark "?". If I click on the "?" I will then insert a picture, sometimes I guessed correctly, and other times I missed the one I wanted by a couple of "?". 

I can work around this by trial and error, but is it me or is there something that has gone amiss.

Chuck


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## ShadsTrains (Dec 27, 2007)

Try clearing your web browser's cache..


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## chuck n (Jan 2, 2008)

I just cleared the cashe and nothing changed about adding pictures. The pictures are in the MLS web space, but they don't show up when it try toi insert them using the tool bar.


An example would be "B&O comp 10.JPG". That is one of the pictures in the MLS storage that doesn't show up when trying to use the insert icon with the pencil. It only shows up as a blank space in the other insert picture option. 


Chuck


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## chuck n (Jan 2, 2008)

I think that I have solved the problem. Taking out the "&" in the title of the picture makes all the difference.










BO comp 12.JPG works, B&O comp 12.JPG doesn't.

Thanks for your response Shad.

I'm not a computer expert, Can some one tell me why the ampersand "&" doesn't work even though it is a character on the keyboard? 


Chuck


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## Dwight Ennis (Jan 2, 2008)

Ampersands, punctuation, and other "special" characters give the web heartburn. Some are set aside for specialized purposes and others cause browsers to hiccup. Much of this is more the web itself and not the MLS software. Spaces can also cause trouble, though the MLS software seems pretty good at converting them to *%20*. Stick with letters, digits, and hyphen ( - ) and the underscore ( _ ) in file and photo names and you'll never have any problems.


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## Semper Vaporo (Jan 2, 2008)

It may look to us mere humanoids that the internet is all just one big homogenous system, but it is really a hodge-podge of operating systems and languages (computer, as well as human) and not all of them use the same conventions as to what different terms and characters mean. The non-alpha-numeric characters were used by various systems/languages for different things or were left as just regular characters and us mere humaniods have little it the way of clues as to which does what in the hodge-podge that is called the internet.

The best thing to do is to just NOT use any of them except where you know they have to be (such as the period/dot used to seperate the file name from the extension, or the AT Sign ("@") between an e-mail address and the e-mail server name). Even the space character can be a problem because in some languages the space character represents a command seperator and would thus indicate the end of a file name and the beginning of some new command or another file name.

"MOST" systems/languages allow the use of the underscore ("_") as a plain character and it can be used to seperate words in a file name; like this: "workfile.txt" could be written as "work_file.txt" to help us humanoids to better understand the file name's meaning. Another thing that can be done is to use upper case on each word when several are all run together, like this: "workfile.txt" could be written as "WorkFile.txt"... but there are some systems that ignore the case of the letters so if you tried to create two files, one with upper case letters and another all lower case, the two could not be created as seperate files as the name would resolve to the same name, but other systems would see that as two separate names.
example: "WorkFile.txt" and "WorkFILE.txt" and "WORKfile.txt" and "WorkFile.txt" on some systems would all be the same file and on other systems would be four totally different files.

It is recommended that you always use lower case letters or ALWAYS refer to any file with the exact same case for the same letters each time you refer to that specific file.

MY "personal" opinion is that I wish EVERYONE would capitalize (upper case) the first letter of each word in a name (both out of respect for the "name" and to help people know where the words begin as an aid in reading the meaning of the name).

Note that the name of this web site is often written with upper case letters in that way; "MyLargeScale" means the same thing as "mylargescale" (or MyLaRgEsCaLe", for that matter!). But by capitalizing the first letter of each part of the name it is lots easier to understand that the web site is "My Large Scale" and not "Mylar Gesc Ale", or "My Larges Cale".


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## chuck n (Jan 2, 2008)

Thanks guys. Live and learn!!

Chuck 


Added question

Can I go into my MLS web space and change the names (get rid of special symbols) without affecting the tags to those pictures in threads?


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## Dwight Ennis (Jan 2, 2008)

Can I go into my MLS web space and change the names (get rid of special symbols) without affecting the tags to those pictures in threads?Not once they're posted, no.


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## Dr Rivet (Jan 5, 2008)

Chuck 

Even money says NO. The HTML references are looking for the EXACT name of the file in your directory, not the starting block [physical] on the disk. For your idea to work, the MLS app would have to scan the entire site for every reference to your original file name and change it to match the new name in the directory [like a REPLACE ALL in MS Word]. That would be a huge use of CPU cycles and disk accesses, not to mention the chance for a monumental screw up. 

Since you cannot go back and edit your original posts to change the file names, just leave the old ones alone and adopt a new naming convention. You spent much more time "breaking rocks" than programming in your career. OLD programming languages not only used "special characters", but had lists of RESERVED WORDS that could not be used as variable names or anything else. If you forgot [or did not know] one of the words you got a compilation error [if you were lucky], or completely strange behavior [like not having the image display]. 

Just remember, most code is written to make it easy on the programmer, NOT the end user.


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## krs (Feb 29, 2008)

Posted By Dr Rivet on 14 Jul 2011 06:30 AM 
OLD programming languages not only used "special characters", but had lists of RESERVED WORDS that could not be used as variable names or anything else. If you forgot [or did not know] one of the words you got a compilation error [if you were lucky], or completely strange behavior [like not having the image display].

The keyword here is "OLD".

I don't think anyone who posts on mls should have to worry about the multitude of symbols and/or words that could not be used as part of a file name when posting on mls or adding a picture.
If there are limitations due to the software like the "&" for example, they should just be spelled out in a 'sticky' that people can refer to rather than have the users get frustrated by trying something over and over again that will never work.


A friend of mine started this Large Scale database about three years ago and there are currently over 3000 pictures listed.
In all that time, there was never a situation where the name of the picture file was not accepted or created a problem - and people typically use file names that mean something.
I just tried entering a pictore there with the file name B&O, another with the file name Ge 4/4 III (spaces and a slash), and all of those are accepted without problems the way it should be.

Reasonably modern software shouldn't have these types of issues - if the software used on mls still does, then let's just spell out these limitations in some reference area on mls to save everyone the frustration of trying to do something that is impossible with this software.

Same goes for all the other "quirks" of the software that is used with mls.
I certainly appreciate all the help in that area that Steve is providing over and over again - often for issues that have already been covered in the past, but please, either fix the bugs, or use software that doesn't have all these bugs, or at least make a list of these bugs along with the work-arounds.

Knut


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## SteveC (Jan 2, 2008)

Posted By chuck n on 13 Jul 2011 08:20 PM 
{snip...}[/i] I'm not a computer expert, Can some one tell me why the ampersand "&" doesn't work even though it is a character on the keyboard? {snip...}[/i]
Chuck

Because within Internet Standards the "&" is considered an unsafe character (i.e. meaning it may work as expected, then again it may not) to be transmitted across the Internet as part of file name, which is outside the character's normal syntax.

The term _syntax_ may be used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language. While you may not normally think of an Internet address as being part of a language with a specific protocol, but it is.

Most likely the following three links will provide more information than you want, but if interested you can take a peek if you like.









Light duty reference...
w3schools - HTML URL Encoding Reerence[/b]

Medium duty reference... (check out the Generic syntax, Examples, )
Wikipedia - URI Scheme[/b]

Real heavy duty reference... (if you're really in for punishment)
IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) - RFC 3986 / Std. 66 Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax[/b]


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## chuck n (Jan 2, 2008)

Thanks Guys. I will now write and instead of &.

Chuck


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## wigginsn (Jan 9, 2008)

"Mylar Gesc" Ale 

Sounds interesting - do you know where I can get some? 

Cheers 
Neil


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## SteveC (Jan 2, 2008)

Posted By chuck n on 14 Jul 2011 12:46 PM 
{snip...}[/i] I will now write and instead of &. {snip...}[/i]
Chuck

If you've already included the existing images that you've already got stored in you're 1st Class web space. Just leave them there they won't hurt anything, and if you change the name you'll break any existing links you already have.

As a work around if you want to use those same images again in the future. Just access your 1st Class space directly using /chuckn/[/b] (click the preceding link and once on the web page create a bookmark to the page). You'll see all of your image files listed including the ones with the "&", and if you click on the file name your browser will display the image you clicked.

You can also copy the URL displayed in the browser's address field and use it for a URL address to the image file. However, I would suggest that you replace the actual "&" character in the URL with the following three characters %26[/b], which is the URL encoding for that character.

Hope the above is of help, don't mean to cause confusion.


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## chuck n (Jan 2, 2008)

Thanks Steve. I can work around the problem by hit or miss when I go to the insert image icons (without the pencil). I see the small empty icons, in between pictures. I just click on the empty icons until I get the one that i want. I have always had this problem and I could never figure out why some pictures loaded in the viewer and others didn't. Now I know.

In the past there were only a few empty icons so it was relatively easy to get the correct picture. Since I had recently loaded about 20 pictures with the B&O in the file name it was a little more difficult to find what I wanted to upload into a post. 

I was curious as to why I was having problems. Once the light bulb went off in my head about the ampersand possibly being a problem, I tried doing it without the ampersand it worked. Now I know why I had the same problems with the DM&IR files.


I really appreciate the help and the answers. Maybe this will help others who have problems loading pictures from their MLS space.

Chuck


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