[ARCHIVED] Special characters in User Profile

[maguire]

I recently was updating my user profile and one of the things that I noticed was that when I pasted in content from a slide (of a short biography) that the beta and superscript plus did not appear in the profile's bio. For example, where I expect the beta character was an  - based upon fetching the user profile via the API. However, if I create the characters using RCE in a Canvas page (using β⁺), then I can copy and paste them and they come out in the profile as β⁺. (As they do when pasted into this posting.)

It is a little surprising to me that:

1.  the bio text is not able to be entered using RCE (or similar tool),
2. there is no API to PUT the "bio" field into the profile - there is only a GET API endpoint, and
3. it seems that "title" was once enterable by a UI as should at https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Student-Guide/How-do-I-edit-my-profile-in-my-user-account-as-a-st...  - but it is not clear that this functionality still exists.

The program get_user_profile.py can get the user's profile information, see  https://github.com/gqmaguirejr/Canvas-tools

While it might not be that important to many people to be able to put such special characters into their profile, it was an interesting issue to look into.