[Gretl-users] Re: db.nomics and OECD data

Am 05.11.2024 um 03:30 schrieb Allin Cottrell: > A few more thoughts on the messed-up dbnomics database identifier. > > Here's what we know: > > 1) The second scripting example that Klaus posted contained strange > "invisible" bytes in the supposed database identifer, as it appeared > on the mailing list. > > 2) If you try to get data from dbnomics using the identifier as shown, > it doesn't work. > > 3) If you delete the strange bytes, leaving plain underscores, you get > the data from dbnomics OK. A follow-up on this: I had another real use case, which involved copying the codes from the db.nomics website. I got an error but remembered Klaus's problem and so I deleted the copied underscores and re-typed them in gretl's editor. Still an error - the cause was that deleting the underscores didn't affect the invisible characters right *after* the underscores. So that was quite subtle. Bottom line: I wonder whether gretl's editor could use some gtksourceview library internal switch to display invisible bytes by default in the future. Those characters do not belong in hansl scripting files (I'd say), and so displaying them in the form of some weird unicode codepoint would immediately show the problem.