this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Programmer Humor

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[–] AmazingAwesomator@lemmy.world 123 points 2 months ago (5 children)

another good one to sneak in there... thai zero-width space: U+200B

cant see it, nothing reads it, and it makes everything error. : D

[–] CallMeAnAI@lemmy.world 24 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Came here to say fuck the zero width space. I spent 90 hours in the depths of solr looking for this fucker who brought down our entire search index.

[–] derfunkatron@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I deal with shy hyphens a lot. They don’t display unless there’s a line break, so they get copied from various word docs or websites and end up in a database somewhere waiting to piss me off.

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[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm guessing that they pasted code from inside Microsoft Word.

[–] CallMeAnAI@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

No. CMS updated to support new character set while solr did not. Not enough sanitization.

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[–] anton@piefed.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 months ago

‏The right to left mark (U+2000F) can also be fun.

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[–] MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml 81 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Pretty much any ide will spot that. Maybe you can use it to teach your colleagues not to use a plain text editor.

[–] tisktisk@piefed.social 32 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'm gonna need the vi guy to teach me how to get this functionality in nvim pls--don't make me leave

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The plugin YouCompleteMe would show a warning on that line

[–] tisktisk@piefed.social 5 points 2 months ago

Thank you masterchief Veidt! (I had to do it, best name ever)

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[–] AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 14 points 2 months ago

You can pry my vim and nano from my cold, dead hands!

^(I use an ide sometimes)^

[–] saigot@lemmy.ca 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

In VSCode (yeah yeah MS bad, I have to use it for work) it puts a yellow box around the charcater, which I don't immediately recognize the meaning of and highlights the line as "identifier "blah;" is undefined". It's not like your gunna spend all day on it, but that could waste a couple minutes if the dev wasn't paying close attention, which is "fun prank" territory.

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Can you choose to use VSCodium instead? It's practically identical, but isn't controlled by MS.

[–] saigot@lemmy.ca 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The reason it's de facto mandatory is due to some in house extensions, assuming they work with this I could, but I also don't particularly care about my privacy on a work machine. But I will be checking this out for my personal stuff!

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[–] Soot@hexbear.net 8 points 2 months ago

I mean sure, but it'll still likely leave 'em scratching their heads for a while before they go "I guess I just.. replace the semicolon..?"

[–] sxan@midwest.social 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's the plain text editor Helix. In a terminal. Over ssh. On my phone. Which I can do because I'm not using a dumb IDE.

[–] MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 months ago (6 children)

Developing on a phone sounds like one of the most unpleasant experiences I can imagine. And I include dinner with my ex.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 5 points 2 months ago

It absolutely would be. It is, on the other hand, occasionly useful to be able to pop in and change a config file, many of which are actually Turing complete languages. What I do far more often, though, is SSH into remote, headless servers and write code there, which is exactly the same as doing it from a phone, only much more comfortable.

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[–] segfault11@hexbear.net 54 points 2 months ago (1 children)

fr*cking rust ruining the fun sicko-wistful

[–] somerandomperson@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 2 months ago

You can't err out rust.

[–] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 34 points 2 months ago

Okay fuck you op

[–] paequ2@lemmy.today 23 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

IDE users pretending compilers don't exist.

$ guix shell gcc

[env]$ g++ test.cpp 
test.cpp:4:16: warning: `0;' is not in NFC [-Wnormalized=]
    4 |         return 0<U+037E>
      |                ^~~~~~~~~
test.cpp: In function ‘int main()’:
test.cpp:4:16: error: unable to find numeric literal operator ‘operator"";’
test.cpp:4:18: error: expected ‘;’ before ‘}’ token
    4 |         return 0;
      |                  ^
      |                  ;
    5 | }
      | ~

Look ma, no IDE! 😸

[–] scott@lemmy.org 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] chortle_tortle@mander.xyz 11 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Tried to figure out which was which by googling, but it seems they are both read as semi colon, however you can see the difference in the characters. Wild

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[–] unyons@feddit.org 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This is indeed some next-level fuckery.

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[–] sovietknuckles@hexbear.net 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I don't see a problem

#include <iostream>

#define ; ;;

int main(){
  std::cout << ";\n";
}
[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 months ago

Whoa the font on the Lemmy web UI actually renders them differently!

[–] AddLemmus@lemmy.ml 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

With the "wonderful" tooling at work, we use Skype for Business. Naturally, that is not the primary place to send around code and configs, but a 1-liner or 2-liner happens.

You can't believe the nonsense it does when you try to copy & paste it. Spaces get turned into non-breaking spaces etc. Looks completely normal when pasted directly into vim on a console, but will give "odd" error messages.

[–] BananaIsABerry@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] AddLemmus@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 months ago

At this point, even Microsoft wants them to stop using it, but they are stubborn and try to keep it running until they turn off the lights the hard way.

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[–] kamen@lemmy.world 11 points 2 months ago

Any half-decent editor/IDE/command line tool will scream at you about this; plus there's version control which should help you spot it as well.

[–] waigl@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago

There is no wise way to use that information.

But the foolish ones could be entertaining.

[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Wow!

This seems to be further evidence that the process for assigning UTF entities has been thoroughly corrupted.

You can (apparently) copy/paste this on mobile:

";" (Greek question mark)

";" (Semicolon)

You can even render it in HTML:

    &#894;
    &#x37E;

And it's included on Wikipedia, because of course it is:

Because I'm not sure what my mobile client will actually do with this comment, here's the link to the HTML entity I used:

Also there's plenty of other character joy to be had:

[–] tisktisk@piefed.social 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If I don't understand what's happening here but want to, should I research Unicode in general or something else?

[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Unicode is a way to encode the things that humans use to write stuff into a computer.

ASCII is for example another way, as is EBCDIC.

All these methods translate squiggles that we've used for centuries into something that can be represented inside a computer.

For example, the letter "A" is under ASCII represented by the number 65.

This post is pointing out that there are two characters that look identical, but have different numbers, which means that what the user sees is identical, but what the computer sees is different.

This is the basis for much tomfoolery.

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[–] scott@lemmy.org 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

What exactly do you think you can do with this?

[–] socsa@piefed.social 18 points 2 months ago

Chaotic evil linting rules

[–] argh_another_username@lemmy.ca 11 points 2 months ago (6 children)

Take someone’s source code, replace all semi colons with Greek question marks and see if they can compile. But as others said, any IDE will help.

[–] HairyHarry@lemmy.world 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not all! Just one or two per file.

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[–] tisktisk@piefed.social 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

mess with whoever has the least modern ide? I'm sure there's something else too hold on

[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Would probably be more effective to mess with Linux config files that use semicolons. Especially if it's run as a daemon because Systemctl doesn't always return helpful error messages for configuration errors.

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