[HN Gopher] Invisible Characters
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Invisible Characters
Author : 0xbkt
Score : 55 points
Date : 2022-12-04 17:58 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (invisible-characters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (invisible-characters.com)
| orbital-decay wrote:
| 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/en/202E/
| interroboink wrote:
| 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
| (:
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I agree with you.
|
| I've got my Emacs set up to display in "bold, fluo foregound
| and a dark background underlined by a pink line" (yes,
| literally that obnoxious) any character which is not part of a
| list of characters I consider to be acceptable. And it's
| configured to show any "zero width" character as if it had a
| width. So any "invisible character" as well as any "invisible
| zero width character" does appear as a black square, underlined
| with a pink line.
|
| And that for any buffer/file.
| enchiridion wrote:
| Can you share that config? Sounds useful!
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Sure... For a start I have my _scratch_ buffer showing a
| few Unicode characters, one trailing spacing character on
| purpose (to be sure I can see it 's highlighted), a zero-
| width-non-joiner 0x200C and an Hangul filler 0x3164 (may
| add some from TFA btw). This helps me quickly verify, upon
| startup, that my setup is working.
|
| I configured all that literally years ago so I don't
| remember where's what but here's what I've got:
| ;; probably cargo-culted from somewhere (update-
| glyphless-char-display 'glyphless-char-display-control
| '((format-control . empty-box) (no-font . empty-box)))
| ;; See https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/65108
| (set-face-background 'glyphless-char "purple")
|
| And then I've got this too (requires _markchars.el_ ):
| (markchars-global-mode)
|
| With: (defface markchars-heavy
| '((t :underline "magenta")) "Heavy face for
| `markchars-mode' char marking." :group
| 'markchars)
|
| It should get you started.
|
| (and, yup, I know it's overkill but I like it that way)
| saliagato wrote:
| abrudz wrote:
| Great for doing tacit programming[1] in JavaScript:
| avg==>.reduce((,)=>+)/.length avg([3,1,4,1,5]) 2.8
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_programming
| csswizardry wrote:
| https://csswizardry.com/2014/01/use-zero-width-spaces-to-sto...
| Minor49er wrote:
| numlock86 wrote:
| hamiltonians wrote:
| usefull for impersonation scammers , like on twitter
| franky47 wrote:
| [1]
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/fortysevenfx/status/1599483273864187904
| 30minAdayHN wrote:
| back in 90s on windows, our secret directory used to be alt+255
| (it looks like a space but not space i think)
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Which is a non-breaking space (U+00A0), which is mapped to 0xFF
| in the code page 437. (You need to put a leading zero to access
| to Unicode code points, like alt+0255 for U+00FF y.)
| dezen0ts wrote:
| A great way for QA's to mess with developers
| squaredot wrote:
| The problem is maybe more when QA doesn't mess with developers,
| than when it does.
| bombcar wrote:
| If QA doesn't do it malicious users and crackers will.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| yeah.. please do eff around with the staging environment so
| that i can get traces and poke at it. prod is too locked
| down.
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(page generated 2022-12-04 23:00 UTC)