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Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters

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Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters

#12

It might make more sense as a clipboard filter. If you're an English speaker that doesn't often handle languages which gain from zero width characters you could just have a listener scan your clipboard for zero-width characters, silently strip them, and then re-populate the clipboard. Although I've been thinking about building a clipboard filter for Windows a lot lately, I'm getting tired of copying text to the addre…

Zero width characters can also be used to force long strings of text to wrap correctly, so this may break the layout of sites that allow things like URLs in UGC text.

Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters

#16
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ctrl+shift+v pastes without formatting

Not on all apps though. Office apps do not respect that shortcut convention and require clicking on the "Paste Without Formatting" button.

In Office, you can hit Ctrl after pasting, then "t" to select paste without formatting, which is nicer than switching from keyboard to mouse. The obnoxious thing is that, if the source text did not actually have formatting, then there is no menu that opens by Ctrl, and "t" is instead inserted verbatim. Wrecks havoc with my muscle memory, that I need to keep track of where I copied text from when pasting.

Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not on all apps though. Office apps do not respect that shortcut convention and require clicking on the "Paste Without Formatting" button.

In Office, you can hit Ctrl after pasting, then "t" to select paste without formatting, which is nicer than switching from keyboard to mouse. The obnoxious thing is that, if the source text did not actually have formatting, then there is no menu that opens by Ctrl, and "t" is instead inserted verbatim. Wrecks havoc with my muscle memory, that I need to keep track of where I copied text from when pasting.

As much as that would be a helpful shortcut to remember, I know I won't. As a result, I just changed the default paste settings in Office.

Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters

#18
A bit tangential, here's a few unix utils you can use to inspect text:

`vis`: display non-printable characters in a visual format

`cat -e`: Display non-printing characters and display a dollar sign (`$') at the end of each line.

`hexdump -c`: Display the input offset in hexadecimal, followed by sixteen space-separated, three column, space-filled, characters of input data per line.

`od -a`: Output named characters.

Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters

#19

A bit tangential, here's a few unix utils you can use to inspect text: `vis`: display non-printable characters in a visual format `cat -e`: Display non-printing characters and display a dollar sign (`$') at the end of each line. `hexdump -c`: Display the input offset in hexadecimal, followed by sixteen space-separated, three column, space-filled, characters of input data per line. `od -a`: Output named characters.

Is `hexdump` not `xxd`?
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