Live data from Hacker News

Invisible Characters

invisible-characters.com

21–30 of 36 posts

Re: Invisible Characters

#21

This is another good reason to have a text editor you really trust, which can show you these things. Whether it's different line-endings or weird invisible space stuff, I know I can just open it in Vim and figure out what's really going on pretty quickly. Wasted a lot of time earlier in my life on that nonsense (:

I use a DOS text editor for this, where no Unicode support is an advantage. The majority of the time I'm dealing with plain ASCII anyway.

Re: Invisible Characters

#22

A while back I used these kinds of characters to encode programs into invisible text: https://www.thelisowe.com/sleeper-cell-a-method-of-embedding... It doesn't do much on its own. I feel like it could, but the most effective use case I've come up with it you can invisibly plant a piece of code in some piece of text, then later on run another script that looks for that piece of code and runs it. I'm guessing that spl…

I’ve seen it as a Bacon code in capture-the-flag.

Re: Invisible Characters

#23

My favorite is U+202E Right-to-Left Override, which doesn't appear to be listed there. A surprising amount of UIs (apps, sites) can be broken with it as they were never tested with right-to-left writing direction in mind. Even a Unicode reference website that I just used to recall the code is broken by it. [0] Entering RLO into arbitrary input forms for fun can bend spacetime, I swear. [0] https://unicode-table.com/e…

[deleted]

Re: Invisible Characters

#24

This is another good reason to have a text editor you really trust, which can show you these things. Whether it's different line-endings or weird invisible space stuff, I know I can just open it in Vim and figure out what's really going on pretty quickly. Wasted a lot of time earlier in my life on that nonsense (:

[deleted]

Re: Invisible Characters

#25

My favorite is U+202E Right-to-Left Override, which doesn't appear to be listed there. A surprising amount of UIs (apps, sites) can be broken with it as they were never tested with right-to-left writing direction in mind. Even a Unicode reference website that I just used to recall the code is broken by it. [0] Entering RLO into arbitrary input forms for fun can bend spacetime, I swear. [0] https://unicode-table.com/e…

https://xkcd.com/1137/

Re: Invisible Characters

#26
So I guess the only future-proof solution to check for this is to render user input off screen and count the number of solid pixels, at least until "falsehoods programmers believe about names" gets updated to include "Names must consist of at least one readable glyph".

Re: Invisible Characters

#28

My favorite is U+202E Right-to-Left Override, which doesn't appear to be listed there. A surprising amount of UIs (apps, sites) can be broken with it as they were never tested with right-to-left writing direction in mind. Even a Unicode reference website that I just used to recall the code is broken by it. [0] Entering RLO into arbitrary input forms for fun can bend spacetime, I swear. [0] https://unicode-table.com/e…

I've blissfully ignored RTL so far, but I know that I shouldn't - I just can't imagine the pain of actually figuring out how to deal with it. :')

My favourite character is the Greek question mark;

Re: Invisible Characters

#29

So I guess the only future-proof solution to check for this is to render user input off screen and count the number of solid pixels, at least until "falsehoods programmers believe about names" gets updated to include "Names must consist of at least one readable glyph".

"Names must consist of at least one visible glyph".

Re: Invisible Characters

#30
post #17

Great for doing tacit programming[1] in JavaScript: avg=ㅤ=>ㅤ.reduce((ㅤㅤ,ㅤㅤㅤ)=>ㅤㅤ+ㅤㅤㅤ)/ㅤ.length avg([3,1,4,1,5]) 2.8 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_programming

I love point-free functions languages that support them, but please tell me you're not actually do this
Post reply on HN