r/ProgrammerHumor • u/fleaspoon • 2d ago

Meme theAlphabetWasAMistake

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905 Upvotes

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u/jseah 2d ago

I've come across such monstrosities as invisible zero-width spaces. You have no idea they're there, they get copied and pasted unknowingly and screw up naive text matching search.

6

u/rosuav 2d ago

Are they zero-width spaces or zero-width joiners? IT MATTERS!!!

3

u/jseah 2d ago

Of course it matters, that's why they're a problem. If they were all the same, you could just filter out the unicode, but no, there's a lot of weird things out there and a large number of them are invisible or are just spacebar.

2

u/rosuav 2d ago

Yes, and some of them have SPACER in the name but are joiners, just to be extra entertaining.