thatsEvil

_Decimation

My favorite Unicode character is U+200B , the zero width space. You can imperceptibly smuggle the character inside any string:

foo (3 characters)

bar (4 characters)

WhileGoWonder

Evil. Too evil. You must be stopped.

_Decimation

‍

WhileGoWonder

😭😭😭

_Decimation

That one was actually my second favorite character, U+200D , zero width joiner. Wield this character wisely...

usernmane

My favorite unicode character is π“‚Ί

FibroBitch97

My fav Unicode characters are

π“€₯    𓁆 𓀕

𓁆 π“€Ÿ   π“€£ 𓁀

tocard2

motherfucker is that loss?

FibroBitch97

Yes, yes it is

tocard2

that's earned a pinned spot on my clipboard for sure. thanks dude

grasscoveredhouses

BITCH IS THIS CAKE

Vinnie_NL

:.|:;

FibroBitch97

How did you do the cross?

:.|:;

KROSSEYE

Strikethrough

theajharrison

Lmao it shows up on Android mobile app

Solarwinds-123

cows squeeze march relieved bake chubby safe husky swim spoon

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with

mad_scientoast

Wait you can still use RiF? I thought it got taken down when the API changes happened.

Unluckybloke

What even is that supposed to be lol

oktin

Windows censors it by default unless it's with other hieroglyphics

But it's a dick "with emission"

Unluckybloke

I can see that it looks like a dick, but there's no way it's actually a dick, right?

oktin

It is. Ancient Egyptians need to write the word "cum" too, and that's how they write it.

(I don't actually know its translation, I'm just assuming)

Poat540

It’s definitely at a minimum

black_moist

unless it's with other hieroglyphics

For that special edge case when people are communicating with hieroglyphs over the internet πŸ˜‚

Raubritter

edge case

Phast_n_Phurious

Exactly what it looks like

far_in_ha

kazhena

Thank you for sharing this β™‘

PCRefurbrAbq

I ran into phishing spam just last night, identical to an Xfinity "bill overdue" email. I spent too long examining the filthy thing.

  • They had a series of zero width joiners and non-breaking spaces in the HTML to break up spam filter trigger words
  • The title in the HTML section (never shown on emails) was "Catholic Charities World Weekly Update 6/4/2024".
  • The subject line was encoded as UTF-8, so the spam filter didn't notice it said "Your Bill Was Returned To Us."
  • All of the links were obfuscated through emails.xfinity.com "safe" links.

It was masterful obfuscation, and I hate it.

LittleCovenousWings

That's so nasty, Imagine if they applied this kind of effort into a legal role instead of this.

PCgaming4ever

Holy crap that's nasty

yomommafool

D4edalus34

Noted

GnuhGnoud

U+130BA is my fav

siphagiel

‍

DummyTaiko

‍

[deleted]

It’s Chaos not Evil. Easy to mix them up because as gods they both look similar.

figureskatingaintgay

I once dealt with a system where some crack pot developer decided that the zero width space should be used as a separator in a database field. I could not get any of my data to work, but copying pasting their data worked just fine. I was near the brink of madness debugging that damn system.

_Decimation

Standard delimiters: ❌

Invisible Unicode character: βœ…

gimpwiz

They call that job security, bro. CSV? Sure except my "C" is an invisible space character. Enjoy.

rdrunner_74

Yes... thats the art of refucktoring.

Modify the code so noone else will touch it

jobstinate

I’m a (full-stack + devops) with 14 years experience and somehow my boss thinks that a fresh college grad can do my job.

More job security tips please!

KappaccinoNation

Is the crack pot dev named Satan?

Phormitago

surely that was done for job security... and seeing you were messing with that db instead of the og guy , i reckon it didn't pan out

figureskatingaintgay

you'd think but it was enterprise software we were integrating into. The developer surely expected people to look at and even work with that data field. I'm thinking the developer was just an idiot. Spend enough time in the industry and you see lots of proposed ideas that seem great to the one person and takes another person to stand up and say "what the fuck dude, are you dumb?".

PCgaming4ever

Lol I'm laughing too hard just imagining some guy who's been at the company for a long time showing off his software and the new guy stand up and just yells your a freaking idiot

LeSaR_

you should tell them about ascii 0x1f

mrissaoussama

that would be very fun when debugging strings

Linked713

Which is why I make a point on exploding into arrays of singular characters if I notice a mismatch.

Skrukkatrollet

Any uncommon space character fucking sucks to deal with, I had some code that broke occasionally, which turned out to be because of C2A0, a non breaking space, which wasn’t visible in my editor for some reason.

SomeAnonymous

Non-breaking space is great because it's typologically actually useful even in English, but even so it completely blindsides so many pieces of software.

gmano

It's also super fucky with copy-paste a lot of the time.

If you copy-paste the below, it won't keep its structure.

V V
V

LOLBaltSS

Was a common meme on 4chan since you had to use the alt codes to triforce. Pasting wouldn't work.

-Nicolai

Explain like I'm stupid

The-Rizztoffen

The first thing I thought of as well

meedstrom

It does for me when I paste into a text editor. Isn't that one of the selling points, that it is preserved in that kind of operation?

V V
V

Ok I give up, what'd you do when pasting into Reddit? I guess Reddit is treating it the same as a normal space for the purposes of collapsing spaces. Unusual.

airz23s_coffee

You can't do it copy pasting, but you can go into source on the comment and nick it.

V V
V

/&nbsp i haven't seen in yonks though

recluseMeteor

I'm so used to it because I work in localisation and translation. Most style guides mandate using NBSPs to separate stuff that shouldn't break to other lines, like a number and its measurement unit.

JBHUTT09

Hitting ALT + SPACE on Mac OS produces U+00A0 aka NO-BREAK SPACE [NBSP] , which I've never seen be identified in any IDE I've worked with, yet will break code in some, if not all, languages. It is so easy to fat finger and if you've never encountered it before, you can lose hours trying to figure out wtf is wrong.

gimpwiz

It works in markdown to make extra big paragraph breaks.

Like this.

xboxps3

My VS Code puts a yellow box around it.

StimulatedUser

my mac doesnt even have a alt key..

CarlYehaw

I always use that one whenever I need to print a "secret token" operations hate me

Jjabrahams567

My favorite is the braille space. Counts as a word character and is the only way to make a post on Reddit with a blank title.

siyo21

i worked on multiple costly bugs because this character exists and it always takes an eon to find…

FeFreFre

So, are u telling me that the essay that need to have 20000 characters can have a lot less?

_Decimation

It will increase the character count, but not the word count.

However, I spent the past hour experimenting with Unicode and managed to create a "magic space-word" sequence which substitutes as a "space" while also functioning as a "word".

] ⁠ [

I'm banging rocks together

Ordolph

That along with U+00A0 the non-breaking space. The fun thing about it is that it presents the same as a regular space but is a different character, so 'Test A' <> 'Test A' which to the sane person makes absolutely zero sense. I had a broken sql stored procedure that took me about a week to fix because when copying it into MSSQL studio it was having all the regular spaces replaced with non-breaking spaces which was fucking up a comparison inside it.

gmano

Even worse, if you copy and then paste a string with an NBSP, sometimes it gets converted to a regular space.

As far as reddit is concerned, leading spaces get dropped from a comment. Leading NBSP does not, but if you copy a string with leading nbsp and paste it, it will.

If you try to copy:
V V
V

You will get:
V V
V

Or possibly:
V V V

OMG_A_CUPCAKE

Reminds me of the old triforce meme that circulated on 4chan

SmallTalnk

note that many IDEs will show things or other symbols used for blanks Iike a dot or its unicode value, or some highting message ("The character U+200d is invisible. Adjust settings").

barfobulator

Just think how much frustration would be caused before the offending string gets read in an IDE that marks it

ChaosPLus

Is inputting it on windows as easy as holding alt and typing out 200B or do we not have that luxury?

_Decimation

Maybe, but I use PowerShell for things like this:

Set-Clipboard "`u{200b}"

You can also use charmap or (better) BabelPad.

Yeetstation4

Idk if the alt numpad method works quite that way, I don't think you can have letters in it.

Edit: since it has to be in base ten, just hold alt and type 8203. Sometimes it puts the ♂️emoji though.

[deleted]

U+200B

edit: crap

just-bair

Hehe I actually added it to my keyboard layout as altgr+space

inTHEsiders

Why… is this even a thing… curse the Unicode devs

Coding-Kitten

It's a way to specify where in a word it is fine to break it apart, for example when it goes over the line width limit & needs to put it to the next line. It's better for words to be split along different syllables, or for compound words to be split along the components of it.

So a zero with space is a way to tell the computer that it's better to split a sentence along there & it doesn't make a difference to how it looks to a human.

Lejyoner07

Wait, people think we check random form data?

You won't see me checking nothing unless it causes a dumpster fire somewhere. Bring prod down and council will hear your word πŸ—Ώ.

OwlBasic1622

Don't underestimate middle-management with free time in their hands

L4t3xs

Too incompetent to check it

OwlBasic1622

Of course, that's why they bother someone who can.

rielly93 [ ]

Can confirm, I was someone who can and those three years really aged me

colin_colout

BI team will notice it, Data Engineers will check the warehouse and pipelines to see that it's "incorrect" at the source DB.

The Software Engineers will get roped in at this point.

YorkieCheese

Yeah lol. Dunno why people think m companies are dysfunctional enough to banish users’ submitted forms (not complains) into a black hole never to be read

colin_colout

Lots of companies hoarddata. They lose track of what anything even is.

BlazingThunder30

In a lot of systems that data is only presented to other users in the system, not the developers.

DoctorWaluigiTime

That or a pattern.

If one random form submission out of dozens, hundreds, or thousands has a cheeky "teehee this is gonna drive them mad" character at the end, who cares.

If 90+% of them have it, then yeah it's likely a code issue.

blahblah19999

Came for this.

king_venny

Damn bro 😳

blahblah19999

Don't kink shame

brknsoul

Little Bobby Tables would like a word...

xutopia

Dude is joking. He's one of the funniest programmers alive.

Tuckertcs

Clearly you’ve never worked in government software. We’ve had our senior dev manually edit fields in the database to fix issues users were having.

[deleted]

That's not the same as checking random datasets. And that's a normal thing to do to resolve bugs.

plippyploopp

Yea? Better than 20hrs to fix an edge case

Tuckertcs

As opposed to having any sort of validation to clean incoming data?

plippyploopp

If it's an edge case then no

redcubie

But you can't really sanitize names. ( )

chin_waghing

[object Object] is my personal favourite

RedstoneEnjoyer

undefined is another great one.

_undefined_user

I was summoned?

Luccacalu

I hate this I hate this I hate this

Everytime I see [object Object] on my log I lose a day of life

Unknown6656

On one hand I pity you.

On the other hand, you deserve that when using weakly-typed programming languages.

CatProgrammer

The real issue is not having a good default string representation for objects. Or not erroring out when it does not exist so you at least get a stack trace.

DesignStrategistMD

οΏΌ is actually way more difficult to debug

No-Bit7559

[Object object] πŸ€“πŸ‘†

antonw51

JavaScript objects turned to strings using .toString() are '[object Object]' , not '[Object object]'

Edit: On second thought, is that supposed to be a joke? I'm not sure.

Drapidrode

Joseph Heller, Major Major

theneedfortheseed

Roger, roger. or roger, Roger?

gydu2202

DonÒ€ℒt worry, itÒ€ℒll be fine; IÒ€ℒm sure theyÒ€ℒve fixed the issue.

GruenerIngo

Thats Just Cam Newtons writing style

OneWholeSoul

This reminds me that Twitch can't handle apostrophes or ampersands in video titles or descriptions.

EDIT: For instance, "Mirror's Edge" becomes "Mirror&#39;s Edge."

[deleted]

Same, I always use 1-1-1970 as my birthday. Let me see if you learnt type conversions in javascript.

well-litdoorstep112

What would it accomplish? 1970-01-01T00:00:00.000Z is just 0. Why would it break something?

Is it something like if(!myDate.getTime()){//error} ? Or is it something else?

twistsouth

I think their point was that if an engineer sees it, it stands out like an error. Makes them wonder if it was an empty value passed to a date function. Because we have all done it at some point.

well-litdoorstep112

Yeah, but what "type conversion in Javascript" has to do with it?

twistsouth

Not 100% sure: Maybe making the dev think they converted a date (string) to a number?

[deleted]

im a noob i dont get it

yjee

It is the epoch

[deleted]

ah sensemake ty

almofin

Type "true" into a search box lol. At work this crashed our entire app because it got converted to boolean, the typical string functions wouldn't work

24NAMANJN

A back end developer would delegate this front end saying, please don’t allow anything beyond fixed set of characters πŸ˜‚

[deleted]

front end validation FTW! Nobody will know right?

right?

24NAMANJN

Yeah.. until the BE has also skipped the validation and somebody hit the API directly. πŸ˜œπŸ˜‚

summonsays

Or they open dev tools and remove the validation lol

pailadin

I remember being on a prοΏ½ject once where the frontend validation was: when the user stops typing, send the user input to an API that will return an error if there are problems with it.

Bali201

Can you say more how this is bad? I’m a noob. Isn’t this what some sites do where they display, say, your password strength as you type so that you can stop adding complexity once you get the β€œstrong password” sign?

pailadin

It took about half a second in-between the user no longer typing and the error message to show up because we were waiting for the server to tell us the user's input had a problem.

I just didn't like how that looked.

EDIT: should clarify this was a while ago and we just POSTed to a server. Nowadays, probably with sockets the speed shouldn't be an issue. Though I still don't think we should've bothered the server with a task the user's computer could do on its own.

gmano

If potentially every single keystroke hits your api, that's a LOT of load

OwnAbbreviations3615

Or auto-search fields..

almcchesney

Tbh I am not mad with this method, the amount of tickets I have received due to misaligned validation on front & backend are just too many.

My team found an edge case in the backend code once validating some input configuration, now we return 400 bad request on a specific config set. Tickets still come in from users that attempt to update their old resources and get our validation messages as the frontend doesn't validate that field if it doesn't change.

turtleship_2006

A good back end developer wouldn't have trusted input from the front end in the first place

24NAMANJN

Yeah, the best way to do is to have validation at both end. But based on this sub, we’re not considering best case scenario.

ThisIsMyCouchAccount

Except when you're the dev doing both.

There's just something demotivating writing FE validation knowing that tomorrow you have to do it all again on the BE.

RedditSlayer2020

We do front end form validation now???

Kovab

Always have been. But never as the only point of validation.

AddisonDeWitt333

Nice idea, but we just block all of that these days - they can't submit

milanium25

azAZ, we dont fuck around

just_nobodys_opinion

Especially for phone numbers

ChiefBroski

fivefivefivedashonetwothreedashfiveseveneightninezero

milanium25

😐

Heribertium

Fuck you. My first name contains a dash and I hate sites that make me spell my own name wrong!

Olhapravocever

or without an accent, and then it's different from the legal document and then you get treated like a criminal because it doesn't match

milanium25

Some of yall wont make it, but its the sacrifice we are willing to make.

Heribertium

I must become pure ANSI then

gmc98765

The real problem comes when the developer not only insists that users mangle their name to a specific format but also insists that it exactly matches an external source (e.g. the name on a payment card) which doesn't necessarily conform to that format. So any user whose "external" name doesn't match the requirements is basically blocked from using the service.

Note that VISA allows single quote, backtick, tilde, period and hyphen to appear in names. Rejecting names because of the presence of those characters will likely get you in trouble with your payment processor and possibly state authorities. In particular, a refusal to accept business from someone with a single quote in the name on their payment card will disproportionately affect people with Irish nationality and/or ancestry (surnames like "O'Hare" etc), and so will typically violate laws which prohibit discrimination on the basis of nationality or ethnicity.

BraveOthello

All of what exactly? Non ASCII characters?

turtleship_2006

Me when I edit the html/js and submit it anyways

DoctorWaluigiTime

Frontend validation for user convenience, backend validation for actual security.

Schnupsdidudel

Oh no, the old codepage conversion trauma ist kicking in again!

jande48

[object Object]

Amazing_Might_9280

Someone that's smarter than me explain this please.

erishun

When you have encoding issues, the characters will often become garbled.

For example, when you have an apostrophe in UTF-8 and it gets decoded as CP-1252, you get the dreaded Ò€ℒ

gmc98765

When you have encoding issues, the characters will often become garbled.

There's a word for this: , taken from Japanese (ζ–‡ε­—εŒ–γ‘) as the issue has historically been so common there.

Schnupsdidudel

I suspect you where born after introduction of Unicode then?

Yggdrasilo

No we're just from Popular, I mean

timoshi17

thatsaRepost

Wrectal

If we needed any proof dead internet theory has arrived, just gotta look at the replies to this crap.

itsjbean

for real and I've seen this exact post several times before. hell the original tweet is almost a decade old

orsikbattlehammer

I had this fucked up bug that I spent weeks trying to uncover a while ago. The customer had sporadic issues with specific employee erroring out a stored procedure, and for the life of me I could not figure out what the issue was. After a while of fucking around I noticed that if I did a select on one of the offending records, copied the offending column, and did an update pasting the same value back in, it worked fine. This drove me to insanity for the next several days. There wasn’t anything wrong with the string, I kept checking it over and over for special characters but it was totally normal. Finally I came to my senses and did an update select instead of copy pasting and it still failed. That was the day I found out that SSMS strips out certain special characters in its result set, so copy pasting didn’t give me the real data.

david30121

RepostSleuthBot

Looks like a repost. I've seen this image 16 times.

First Seen on 2023-01-13 95.31% match. Last Seen on 2024-04-21 76.56% match


Scope: Reddit | Target Percent: 75% | Max Age: Unlimited | Searched Images: 609,829,428 | Search Time: 0.24709s

david30121

good bot

david30121

ok, OP miight be a repost bot

helmsb

I’ve use the Mongolian Vowel Separator (U+180E) occasionally for a terrible piece of software I used to have to use that had all kinds of weird text restrictions and it would allow you to add whitespace or skip fields. I have it set up as a shortcut when I type ;khaaannn.

shuozhe

NaN was enough to confuse a web dev for a while (my surname is Nan, I use it frequently to mark data entry to check)

Philip246

Don't forget to submit any date as 1970/01/01

MistyNoj

SO IT WAS YOU! /jk

gamma_02

One of my favorites is adding [object Object] in a text field when I can

meme_and_learn

You assumed that I look at how my code is performing after I launch it. Jokes on you!!

myrsnipe

Lmao I had to redo some imports yesterday because somewhere in the chain there was an excel sheet when exported as csv used windows style encoding instead of utf8

larsjarred9

This man is the reason I do regex validation πŸ˜†πŸ˜‚

chocolateAbuser

β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘ β–‘β–‘β–‘ β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘ β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘β–‘

TheRealRevBem

Special place in Hell

[deleted]

like if we check πŸ˜‚

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