HTML entities (""") appear in title of Observation of the Week post

[sullivanribbit]

Platform: Website.

Browser: I am using macOS Sonoma 14.0 and I see the same issue in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. It also occurs on iPadOS 17.1. I presume it happens on all browsers on all platforms.

URL: https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/86178-a-giant-springtail-observation-of-the-week-10-24-23

Screenshots of what you are seeing:

Description of problem:

Step 1: Create a browser window with 2 or more tabs (just so the webpage’s title will be displayed somewhere; some browsers will display the title even if there’s only 1 “tab” in the window, but others won’t).

Step 2: Visit the Observation of the Day for 10/24/23 (via the link in this bug report or any other way).

Step 3: Look at the page title, typically displayed at the top of the tab (but elsewhere in some browsers)

The topic title contains double-quote characters (‘"’). But these are appearing in the browser UI as written-out HTML entities (‘&quot’). Somewhere there is code that is improperly encoding special characters in the HTML page titles that appear in the “head” element of the page.

I presume this issue would also affect any other Observation of the Week that includes HTML-encoded characters, or any other page that uses the same webpage-creation framework that the Observation of the Week uses.

[benarmstrong]

I agree. Specifically, this is a case of double-encoding the string that goes into the title tag, so that the entity code & is encoded instead of leaving that character as & so the " entity code will render correctly. Inspecting the page source reveals this in the head element of the page:

<title>A &amp;quot;Giant&amp;quot; Springtail - Observation of the Week, 10/24/23
· iNaturalist</title>

And yes, as you suggested, this happens on other platforms (Firefox on Windows 10 and Linux both confirmed).