Special characters in User Profile

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... Links to an external site.  - 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 Links to an external site.

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.

This content is also available in the Canvas LMS community at https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor/Special-characters-in-User-Profile/m-p/390263#M65 Links to an external site.