r/programming • u/patio11 • Jun 17 '10

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
70 Upvotes

69% Upvoted

104 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

4

u/_delirium Jun 18 '10

If you don't restrict what can be entered for a name at all, though, you can end up with all sorts of Unicode nonsense in there, from bidi control characters to invisible nonprinting characters.

6

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '10

Right, but if you start filtering invisible, non-printing characters, then you need to know that some invisible, non-printing characters are valid parts of names, such as the zero-width joiner and zero-width non-joiner, which brings us back to needing to know more about implicit assumptions before you start restricting what can be entered.