I found one! (a bug)

Well, it was bound to happen.  I found a fairly severe Safari 3 beta bug.  If you’re a web developer or blogger I’ll bet you’ve seen it too.  Have you ever noticed odd characters like: ? & or html entities like &lt &gt appearing in your data? 

The bug has to do with the way Safari submits forms containing data in textarea fields- it randomly corrupts form submissions. 

It really sucks to have to check for randomly changed characters. I think I’m uninstalling safari 3.

I’ve submitted this bug as radar #5470536:

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09-Sep-2007 08:25 PM David Bills:

Summary:
The Safari 3 beta corrupts form data submissions from textarea fields.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load a webpage containing a form with Safari 3 beta
2. Submit data using a textarea field
3. Check submitted data
4. The data will begin to show corruption
5. This may take several tries as it seems to happen at random

Expected Results:
I expect the data to be clean with no extra characters inserted.

Actual Results:
I’ve found the appearance of odd characters my data since begining to use the Safari 3 beta at public launch. Most often, I see a ? at the top of the textarea data field. Occasionally, I notice that a double quote turns into a semicolon and that certain characters like a “greater than” get encoded into html entities.

Regression:
Submitting data to blogs seems to be a good way to trigger this bug. I see it on and off while working on several blogs I’ve developed.

Notes:
This bug has been reported across the web, but I was not aware of the severity until this evening.
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I wonder if Apple sees this bug appearing in their own radar forms.