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I see little Bobby Tables is all grown up
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Allow me to introduce you to my favorite Unicode character, the zero width space
that sounds awesome! (there's 10k zero width spaces between the quotes ->''.)
Hey that's a neat tool. Link?
On Interstellar it shows up as normal spaces for me so there's just a giant block of empty space
Odd, on the Connect app it shows a bunch of spaces, but not 10k of them.
Unfortunately, evil people blacklist this character a lot :(
May I introduce you to my favorite Unicode character, the Braille zero dots
Here is the big list of naughty strings.
What kind of devil came up with this?
Depends on if it breaks the form and they get called. Actually if it gets through they might rightfully question their sanitation coding.
Usually only happened when a French person copied and pasted their text directly from a Word document... dang weird spaces and accented characters... drove my boss mad when I told him it was because it French, and not a glitch.
Still had to work around it... text counters in textboxes had to account for accented characters, which took two bytes instead of one.
"I only have 2000 letters!" ... 2000 including 200 accent characters made it 2200 characters, not 2000.
“I only have 2000 letters!” … 2000 including 200 accent characters made it 2200 characters, not 2000.
Or, you could count it in Unicode characters, and not in whatever bizarro charset you're using over there. Then "À" is one character, just as it's supposed to be.
The problem typically comes from improper conversion between charsets. Like Windows-1252 to Unicode, or something equally horrible.
I was basically calculating in Javavscript then in PHP for validation before I sent it to Zoho.
The DB also was fine. It was honestly just PHP and Javascript. It's all good now though!
Not if the maximum is due to the database being configured to have a maximum space of 2000 bytes for that field.
I remember one day long ago when Notepad++ was the real shit, I was using the vertical selection feature and noticed that the selection was shorter on lines that had accented characters. I thought: "huh, accented characters count as two? What would happen if the selection ended in one? Can I select half a character?" no I could not and I had to restart my computer after trying.
Easy. Just use utf-32 and make the text field a maximum of 500 letters. That will be a maximum of 2000 bytes, doesn't matter if the user is french or Chinese.
I remember feeling extra powerful when Moonshell for the DS shipped with UTF-8 and UTF-16 support because the developer was japenese and wanted to make sure any language would work.
use %20 randomly for fun
my favorite thing to do is go to small town websites and look at the page source for their forms. 70% of the time they have inputs commented out to "disable" forms or just deprecated functionality.
I like to uncomment them and submit the forms just to fuck with them 🤣
I was applying to a job recently, and their online form had a "Upload your documents here" field. Problem was, the input was set to only accept a single file. Well, I wanted to upload two, so I just went into the html and added "multiple" to the input. Which just worked, I even checked the network tab to confirm that both files were submitted.
Haven't heard back from that company yet. It was a web dev position so I hope they appreciate my hijinks 🤞
Can this really not be fixed?
I still see this in various text that's meant to be readable.
Usually ampersands are the biggest culprit, but is it just a really sacred data type that can't be upgraded to include punctuation, but can include the foreign looking wingdings that try to stand in for it?
I'm just confused on why those characters have multi character reference names that aren't part of the regular alphabet or punctuation set either, but those still show up instead of having room to just remove the erroneous reference with the actual character.
It's 2026, just dig out this fossil and fix it already.
It's 2026, just dig out this fossil and fix it already.
That’s the joke. 😅
The characters are all in your own pc. The text data is actually just numbers, referencing the index of each character in a reference table.
Early on someone thought "let's create a bunch of different reference tables and each country uses the one that is best for them so we don't have to include every character in the world".
But that thinking has a critical problem: when you write some text that will only be read within the country, you don't need to keep track of which table you used because everyone will be using the same. Soon you forget that there are other tables for other countries so when you do send an international text using your table as a reference, the person on the other side will be parsing it using their own table and the resulting text will be different. And sometimes when this mixup happens, the index referenced by the text in the other table may actually be some internal control character that is not meant for rendering.
These days the problem is "mostly fixed" by the near-universal adoption of a single reference table that proposes including verything you may ever need (even a lot of emojis) - but this large table means that each character in a text may need more digits to represent the intended index so the total file size for the same text is larger than it would be with the non-universal table.
Exactly. My point is to move to a single universal standard that is used by literally everything so this never happens. Just cut off everything that can't be updated, and it can just sink or swim based on how well it can parse the new table.
Fuck all that ancient non-updateable shit. There's no good reason that old table still exists, much less be possible to use this side of 2000.
Obviously this has legacy problems, but fuck those systems, everyone gotta get new shit now, tough shit. The old table should be cause for new shit to fail compiling in the first place. Shouldn't be possible to use it.
Let's just make forward progress, and lose the chains.
Always include a % in your song titles to crash car music player software that uses sprintf. (h/t to Dave P)
And I would be the one biting that bait hard because mojibake are like a pet peeve of mine.


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