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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

#41

Post by EamonnMR »

Alex3917 wrote: post #12
Someone1234 wrote: post #5

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.

In my experience, adding a zero width character into something that someone might copy/paste is generally a bad idea because it'll lead to some very irritated users having to manually remove them from copied data.

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

#42

Post by laumars »

EamonnMR wrote: post #13

I'll be sure to add a link to http://zerowidth.space

It feels like you're trying to make a point on that site but I cannot fathom out what that point was. Are you saying zero width spaces are bad? Are you educating people that they exist? It's not all too clear what your point is.

Also I disagree with the following:

> If you're working on a website there's a good chance that someone will want to copy/paste it, automate using it, etc. Zero-width spaces will create no end of hassle to those people.

I could work around that with literally just 1 line of code:

    newString = replace(originalString, "​", " ")
But these days many HTML parsers will tidy up the output for you so depending on the frameworks you're using, you might not even need to use the above line of code.

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

#44

Post by agumonkey »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #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.

and under emacs whitespace-mode (just in case)

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

#45

Post by LVB »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #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.

Further tangent: a colleague and I talked about creating a derivative of one of the programmer fonts, replacing smart/curly quotes and another such nuisances with unmistakeable indicators.

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

#46

Post by logicallee »

cyphar wrote: post #40
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #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.

> `vis`: display non-printable characters in a visual format Or `cat -v`, the namesake of http://cat-v.org/ . :P

what is cat-v.org? (Obviously I visited that link, read the about page - I'm asking for your summary. it's still not clear to me after my initial visit.)

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

#47

Post by jonahhorowitz »

ballenf wrote: post #23

It's starting to seem like the universe has some fundamental order for things that we can escape temporarily, but that are inescapable in the long run. 1. Photo and video evidence was a game-changer for establishing facts and chronologies. As we've seen, it's becoming harder and harder to distinguish fake photos and videos from real. It's not a stretch to predict a time when we'll only be able to make probabilistic s…

Photographers have been begging the big camera makers (Nikon/Canon) to add cryptographic signatures to photos from their cameras for years, but so far they've resisted doing so.

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

#48

Post by scbrg »

logicallee wrote: post #46
cyphar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> `vis`: display non-printable characters in a visual format Or `cat -v`, the namesake of http://cat-v.org/ . :P

what is cat-v.org? (Obviously I visited that link, read the about page - I'm asking for your summary. it's still not clear to me after my initial visit.)

I'm sure there are better people to answer this question, but cat-v.org is the personal blog & collection of interesting stuff by former plan9 personality uriel (sadly no longer with us). It hosts random thoughts and lots of interesting stuff (including man pages) about plan9 and early unix systems, and miscellaneous other unix trivia.

It really is a treasure. Take the time to browse, it's well worth it if you're somewhat interested in unix history and not overly familiar with the subject already.

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

#49

Post by sharpercoder »

LVB wrote: post #45
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #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.

Further tangent: a colleague and I talked about creating a derivative of one of the programmer fonts, replacing smart/curly quotes and another such nuisances with unmistakeable indicators.

This would be a useful feature for any programming font. I can totally imagine writing exploits through zero-width characters; smart insertion into interpreted strings (scanners/parsers) can potentially insert a security leak by an attacker. Though input can come from many places off course, this would at least make one vector visible.

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

#50

Post by sharpercoder »

jonahhorowitz wrote: post #47
ballenf wrote: post #23

It's starting to seem like the universe has some fundamental order for things that we can escape temporarily, but that are inescapable in the long run. 1. Photo and video evidence was a game-changer for establishing facts and chronologies. As we've seen, it's becoming harder and harder to distinguish fake photos and videos from real. It's not a stretch to predict a time when we'll only be able to make probabilistic s…

Photographers have been begging the big camera makers (Nikon/Canon) to add cryptographic signatures to photos from their cameras for years, but so far they've resisted doing so.

This is strange, considering the competition going on in this industry.
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