(skeletor is leading by example by adding that unnecessary apostrophe…)

  • Toes♀@ani.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    159
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    To fuck with computers that don’t know how to do UTF8, add a few emoji.

    I once set a WiFi ssid to 🌻 and I was amazed at how much problems that likely caused. I had people showing me their network manager was dumping random characters. Some other routers web interfaces became corrupted when trying to show the neighborhood. Some clients refused to connect. Even a bsod on a windows XP box.

      • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        42
        ·
        9 months ago

        I’m currently in a project where the client has a custom, but not entirely consistent or known subset of utf-8.

        They want us to keep the form content as it is, but remove the “bad” characters. Our current approach is to just forward everything as it is and wait for someone to complain. How TF am I supposed to remove a character without changing the message?

        • Toes♀@ani.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          14
          ·
          9 months ago

          Yeah I had a backend with poor support for anything that wasn’t ASCII. So my solution was turning everything into hex before storing it. I wonder if people are still using it.

          • dan@upvote.au
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            8
            ·
            edit-2
            9 months ago

            Yeah I had a backend with poor support for anything that wasn’t ASCII

            PHP is like this. Poor Unicode support, but it treats strings as raw bytes so it usually works well enough. It turns out a programming language can take data from a form, save it to a database, then later load and render it, without having to know what those bytes actually mean, as long as the app or browser knows it’s UTF-8, for example through a Content-Type header or meta tag.

            The tricky thing is the all the standard string manipulation functions (strlen, substr, etc) don’t handle Unicode properly at all and they deal with number of bytes rather than number of characters. You need to use the “multibyte” (Unicode-ready) equivalents like mb_substr, but a lot of PHP developers forget to do this and end up with string truncation code that cuts UTF-8 characters in half (e.g.if it’s truncating a long title with Emoji in it, it might cut off the title in the middle of the three bytes that represent the Emoji and only leave 1 or 2 of them)

      • dan@upvote.au
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        You just need to ensure you validate character by character (NOT byte by byte) and allow characters in the Emoji Unicode ranges (which are well-defined in the Unicode standard). Using a library is a great idea though.

      • poppy@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        9 months ago

        I had the same issue. (Or rather, cause of issues.) Some devices couldn’t identify it.

    • lud@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      9 months ago

      I had an emoji in my phone hotspot a while ago. Unfortunately I had to remove it after a while because some devices refused to connect.