Detecting invalid, invisible characters in your editor

[Jonathan Lahijani]

From time to time, I copy/paste snippets of code in the forum here to my editor (SublimeText).  Unfortunately, I think the forum software sometimes throws in invalid, INVISIBLE unicode characters that break the copied code and usually will throw PHP errors that at first sight don't make any sense.  These characters are impossible to detect in SublimeText, but with the following plugin I just discovered, it will identify them:

https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Gremlins

[szabesz]

My strategy is to get rid of those characters right off the bat, instead of detecting them. Here is a previous post of mine:

https://processwire.com/talk/topic/20865-permissions-for-page-reference-field-linked-to-users/?do=findComment&comment=180797

By having a system wide tool, one can even use it anywhere not just in a favorite editor. I also use little tools like turning strings into "url friendly string", "lowercase/UPPERCASE/CamelCase".

BTW, the new forum update is very aggressively turns forum ULRs into those big preview boxes. Previous version transformed the link right after pasting it in but not later on. This new forum versions keeps converting the links – on seemingly random occasions – even after I have opted for the "plain text" version . Very annoying.

Edited March 18, 2019 by szabesz
typo

[wbmnfktr]

Kind of related and at least interesting.

https://medium.com/@umpox/be-careful-what-you-copy-invisibly-inserting-usernames-into-text-with-zero-width-characters-18b4e6f17b66

https://medium.com/@aidobreen/hidden-text-fingerprints-and-how-to-avoid-them-d0103edd2ce4

[Jonathan Lahijani]

VSCode plugin:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=nhoizey.gremlins

[pwired]

Quote

BTW, the new forum update is very aggressively turns forum ULRs into those big preview boxes . . . .

Agreed. Seems that the over-engineering is now spreading from processwire into the forum.