Whats an Invalid character

Folksy Site Issues
1

keep getting this

1 error needs to be fixed.

  • Item Description contains the following invalid characters:*

But it does not give me a clue what is the invalid character is

Here is what I’m trying to enter

Fed up with Tailgaters

Then get this Car Decal, it should help
What you will receive is one vinyl decal sticker, size is 20cm long x 10cm high approx
Image is for demonstrative purposes only ad may not be to scale
Comes with pre-fitted application tape and easy to fit Fits to the outside of the vehicle,

*There is NO White or Black background to this sticker, this is the backing paper. *

The design will be in the colour you chose

The sticker is die cut and the surface you mount the sticker to will be the background colour.

Available choice of colours:- White, Pink,Blue,Red,Green, Black and Yellow
colour may differ batch to batch

This novelty vinyl sticker will stick to almost any non-pourous surface such as glass, vehicle bodywork, smooth plastic, kitchen,bathroom tiles, cupboards, mirrors, laptops, etc.

Find this frustrating, as I have uploaded all my photos , filled out all the fields, now can’t save it, well I can’t find a way to save as draft

2

I believe it’s the *

3

The * are not in the listing, the forum put them in when I chose Italic for the font in this post, as a way to highlight the text
But thanks for your reply
Cheers
Steve

1 Like
4

Just opened the text in ‘Open Office Writer’ and it showed an extra space on the end of one line :open_mouth:
but the error message still does not give you a clue as whats wrong

5

Colon :slight_smile: that will be it

6

Na, it’s not that, as I have it in all my listings, I had to check to make sure, but got it working now, here it is

But thanks for taking the time to reply

Cheers
Steve

7

@linthamdesigns is it the dash after the colon? Maybe it thinks you’re trying to insert an emoji.

8

Just the heads up, I think you accidentally put an extra “e” on the word Fed at at the beginning of your description.
Glad you worked the issue out though, it can be really frustrating when you’ve done all the work but cannot save it!

Cheers,
Mina

9

Thanks for that Mina, don’t know how many times I’ve taken that e out, will go and do it again :face_with_hand_over_mouth::shushing_face:
Cheers

10

20cm x10cm should be 20cm by 10cm

11

I have x in my other listings for the dimensions, with no problem, unless you are talking grammar wise , if so then I could change to the ‘by’
Thank for taking the time to look and reply
Cheers Steve

12

Have you used an emoji?

13

Just had a look at this and letting you know that you have missed off the full stop after ‘help’ and should ‘ad not be to scale’ be ‘and’ not to scale or did you mean this to be a shortened version of ‘advert’? also in the full listing the word non porous only has one ‘u’. :smiley:

1 Like
14

I have tried to use the " * " before and had the same error so I replaced with colon and it worked fine afterwards.

15

Did you copy and paste the text from elsewhere? This can sometimes copy across some formatting, which on Folksy just displays as a space, and it’ll be that which is causing the problem (which is why it looks like it doesn’t show the invalid character).

You mention that Writer showed an extra space at the end of a line - is that because it displayed differently? If so, that’s the bad character and removing that should have sorted the problem.
I usually use Writer to find out which the bad characters are, you just need to make sure “field shadings” from the view menu is turned on, and then they should show with a grey background. .

2 Likes
16

Hi Dawn
Thanks for taking a look and the info, will change them (will do better next time :grin:)
Cheers
Steve

17

Hi
No it’s not ‘*’ as the forum put them in when I tried to highlight the text by formatting as Italic
But thanks for taking the time to look and reply
Cheers
Steve

18

Hi Kim
Thanks for taking the time to look and for replying, yes that’s exactly right, copied from my website, I then pasted into Writer to show any extra code/characters, must of missed on space!. I used to use NotePad, but when I kept having trouble listing on Filksy, I tried Writer, konwing that trying to use MicroSoft Word , actually Adds Code to the text, which can cause problems on websites.
But my main poin of this post on the Forum is, dose anybody know where you can find the list of Invalid Characters we are not allowed to use
Many thanks
Steve

19

There are so many characters out there that would probably be a very long list!
It allows standard English letters and numbers, a few other common letters from Latin alphabets (such as é ç ß), and some standard symbols you might be likely to need in a description (- : £ " & % ©), although the title field can be stricter than the description, for example that doesn’t allow £.

There are a lot of symbols it doesn’t allow, as well as letters in other alphabets such as Cyrillic and Arabic, and emojis. It should always tell you which character it is though, if it looks like it hasn’t, that’s because it’s a space that isn’t really a space.

1 Like