Screenshot (click image for larger view):

This script is for people who like to cram their del.icio.us notes right up to the character limit and rip out their hair in rage and frustration whenever their precious words get chopped off during save. It adds to the posting page straight-up, regular character counters for both the description and notes fields, but it also provides some more sophisticated functionality.

del.icio.us allows 255 characters in the description and notes fields, but some characters, once encoded, take up more space than regular characters. So even though you may have typed exactly 255 characters in the notes field, when you save your post some chars will get cut off if one or more of those characters requires extra space. By clicking the "check for large chars" link that this script adds to the posting page, you can see which, if any, of your characters are larger than the regular characters, and then go in and remove/replace them if you want. When you click save, the script does a final check to see if your description or notes field is too large and if so, it offers you a chance to cancel the save and edit the fields.

Also, by default it automatically replaces curly quotes (Unicode code points 8216, 8217, 8220, 8221, which are equivalent to 3 chars when encoded) with straight quotes. (Because I think curly quotes are a waste of valuable space.) You can turn off this option by unchecking the "replace curly quotes" checkbox. Note that the quote replacement, when enabled, takes place anytime you click the "check for large chars" link or the "save" button.

I'll be monitoring the comments here, so please comment with any bugs or suggestions for improvement. I use this script a lot myself, so would welcome any ways to make it better.

Changelog:

• 2007/03/01: Added screenshot.