The most recent TWIC with over 30 events to choose from:

(And by ASCII, I mean the 7-bit ASCII that most of the world agrees on...

E.g. in python

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xef in position 4: ordinal not in range(128) )

There are several examples (though I'm not sure exactly how many):

E.g.

• Philidor's name got fixed, but...

• Ernesto Ché Guevara

• Svein Åge Johansen

remain.

You sure about that?

(I'm talking about in the PGN and playerlist.txt. You may be talking about in the player bio's - where I'm fine with that(*))

My rationale is both the ASCII requirement from the PGN standard - plus I don't want to complicate my life looking up players on <CG>.

(It's bad enough doing historical searching in Cyrillic, let alone Icelandic.)

* * * * *

Actually, I'm not fine with <CG>'s standard for player's who use Cyrillic natively - <CG> should include their "proper" names in the bio - then I could cut and paste for searching.

<the ASCII requirement from the PGN standard>

Here's a source for PGN standard:
http://www.saremba.de/chessgml/stan...

It says, "the 64 code values from 192 to 255 are mostly alphabetic printing characters with various diacritical marks; their use is encouraged for those languages that require such characters."

So what's your source for claiming PGN requires pure ASCII?

<<CG>'s standard for player's who use Cyrillic natively>

The reason we see a lot of html escape sequences for Russian in the bios is that historically it was the only form we supported. We could easily convert them now.

<<beatgiant> But I'm not sure I get your point about copying and pasting. For example, look at Ian Nepomniachtchi and try copying and pasting his Cyrillic name from the bio into google. It works for me, at least.>

<<Alien Math> I'm also confused, what problems are there with <doing historical searching in Cyrillic> or <player's who use Cyrillic natively>?>

Yes, Nepo is acceptable to me, since his Cyrillic name is given.

But the vast majority of other players, whose given names didn't utilize Latin-1 type characters are missing.

Russian and Chinese players, and many others, should ideally include their "native" names in the bio. Now that the web is pretty much agreed on utf-8 there's little reason to avoid it - in the bio intro's.

Wiki provides a good example to follow, generally always listing the major variants of a name.

<CG> might consider making this more standard (i.e. moving it out of Nepo's preamble and putting in more towards the front, again, like wiki).

And to specifically answer <Alien Math>, I want the Cyrillic names of all the Russian players, for example, so that I can simply cut-and-paste it from the <CG> bio I'm reading at the time and utilize it in google searches.

That way, I save myself the tedious step of translating the name with google into Cyrillic. Besides, there might be cases where the google translate is wrong.

It's just a convenience - but a pretty basic one.

Tigran V Petrosian

Not only is he a former World Champion who must suffer the indignity of being listed second on <CG>:

https://www.chessgames.com/perl/che...

but his bio doesn't have his name in either Cyrillic nor Armenian - unlike wiki:

<Tigran Vartanovich Petrosian (Russian: Тигран Вартанович Петросян; Armenian: Տիգրան Վարդանի Պետրոսյան; June 17, 1929 – August 13, 1984)>

Russian and Chinese players, and many others, should ideally include their "native" names in the bio. Now that the web is pretty much agreed on utf-8 there's little reason to avoid it - in the bio intro's.> I see what you mean by wanting the names updated to a standard that can be used in searches with a copy/paste into Google,

Well, I respectfully disagree.

(Though I think biographer involvement is always a "rather good thing"™ )

I could disclose valuable (ha!) technical techniques on how to automate a 1st pass - but let's consider it a simple open challenge for the moment.

Right of course, gg. Doing so would be a good start, and probably easy enough to implement.

I would try to do all players with English-language wiki pages, but digging out the non-English page would be extra credit.

Doing a scrap of wiki would still allow plenty of tweaks for the interested biographer.

(Interesting that you followed over to the Chinese wiki - I had the thought that the <CG> amended names could be links to the player's page in that particular language (if available))

* * * * *

<Alien Math> yes, this kind of stuff seemed to be right up <Annie K>'s alley. It would be nice if <CG> updated her pronunciation guides to HTML5.

Probably a lot easier than doing all the flash code in the original.

Now I have to come to this page and try to talk some sense into yous.

Russian letters, Chinese letters, Arminian letters - I think you all need to take a step back from the project and get some fresh perspective.

Those other letters, like the Cyrillic - such a waste of time and effort. Write everything in English and be done with it. English is the language of the world, like Latin was in ancient times.

Americanize everything and quit getting bogged down in such meaningless minutia.

I think you all do much more meaningful work by chasing down the history of obscure chess players, filling out the history of chess in the 1800s (and earlier). There's some very careful work that has been done in this area and I think it is outstanding. It provides real value to this website because it is original research.

Not to mention it's what chess players like to read about!

Now all this virtue signaling about trying to get those other non-English alphabets to work on the site - rubbish!

No one gives a damn what Tigran Petrosian's name looks like in some chinky looking slavic alphabet.

A couple of lines of boilerplate, and then:

<###

>>> for i in soup.find_all( "span" ):
             if 'lang' in i.attrs: print i

<span lang="ru">Тигран Вартанович Петросян</span>
<span lang="hy">Տիգրան Վարդանի Պետրոսյան</span>

>>>

###>

FWIW - I'm not an editor, just a generic user (by choice), so you must be referring to others.

Still, running an automated program for doing wiki-scrapping would, I presume, involve more capability than any editor/super-editor/biographer would have(*).

Or am I mistaken?

(*) Though not an editor, I still think that most procedures for updating <CG> are done "by hand" via web forms. I suppose form submissions could be automated by a very crafty user - but there be dragons.