Programming HORROR 💀

Unicode highlighting is here to help #shorts

[aliberro]

When you're a Microsoft developer, but still prefer Google over Bing

[LateNlght]

I’d cry if i had a project with an issue like this

[oskrm]

There was this paper about using hidden valid Unicode letters to put in a backdoor in code which at first glance in a code review you wouldn't see.

[jamesjones]

My second programming job i had a hidden white space character in the beginning of an XML file that was being ingested by multiple large scale systems. I spent half a work day, and nearly considered a new career before i finally figured it out. Lived and learned and still programming!

[Jamiered]

I use an extension called "Gremlins" that does more than just invisible characters. It warns about lookalike characters too. There's a bunch of Unicode characters that look the same or similar to other ones that would be otherwise valid in code.

[rejoiceinsanity]

Every student trying to reach a character requirement on a research paper is now saving this Unicode

[Ikxi]

At first I thought this was just some random short but it's by the actual VSCode channel lmao
Good video format 👍

[loganwoodxyz]

Hey! This is exactly what happened to me in a college course. I spent a full day trying to debug before deciding the file itself was corrupt. Re-typed it line-by-line in another file and miraculously it worked.

[harveylawrence]

Why can’t i save these on YouTube. Now I’m gonna forget when I need it.

[MrDoot-hjir]

Your coworker went to the bathroom but left their desktop on. You see this juicy, gigantic, THICC code, fresh and ready to compile and run. You insert a f***ing 0-width character randomly and go back to your desk. You then watch your coworker descend into madness and despair, searching for that unknowable error after reviewing the code hundreds of times. You are literally Satan.

[timgehrsitz]

Thank you VS Code for being easily the best supported and most flexible editor. Don't know what I'd do without y'all

[JeandrePetzer]

Fun fact, you can use this character in usernames and input fields to give yourself the name of " " without it complaining "Please enter a username".

[Natalietrans]

Nice to see companies actually making features based on actual user issues

[xxlarrytfvwxx]

Notepad++ also has a feature similar to this, only instead of showing a box around the character in question, it shows a grey box with the 2/3/4 letter identifier.

[elioakeschandler]

Visual studio is lowkey fire. Keep killing it boys

[eformance]

Darn, you foiled my StackOverflow anti-pasting hack!

[hatter]

This actually happened to me. We had a customer that was having issues with setting up single sign on with our app. Our server was erroring on due to a parse error yet the data *looked* valid. Turns out they had three zero width space characters in the data. Rumor was there were certain elements of the company that were sandbagging the evaluation of our tool on purpose.

[thrash]

Back in programming school, there was this exam in C# where we had to refactor existing code, that was made terrible on purpose, to make it readable and also make it run. The exam was prepared by senior students, who were always in a hardcore dick measuring contest about who could come up with a more difficult and sneaky problem.
One of them decided to use the Greek symbol U+037E, which is ';' instead of a normal semicolon ';' -- when some dude noticed this, the guy running the exam told us where it is and had us fix it because it was such a stupid thing to do...

[ThePC]

*Fun fact:* On macOS, pressing option+space inserts a non-breaking space. It looks just like a normal space, but it (obviously) prevents code from compiling. This little feature caused me so much head scratching, lol.

[inkandesk]

Thank god you guys made this literally going to save someone’s life one day