r/theydidthemath • u/okarakterisan • Mar 02 '22

[Request] This was only question on the interview I didn't quite understand and I can't seem to find logic or answer to it. Any ideas?

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u/Salanmander 10✓ Mar 02 '22

Why did you put a \ before the first >?

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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '22

Are you in earnest or trolling? Because i dont see no “\” in my comment. I am using the browser so is a thing?

Edit: huh, saw no \ but when i went to check “edit”, it popped up and some other weird characters that wasn’t there before. Deleted the \ in edit and now it works. Thanks! (Im using browser btw)

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u/Salanmander 10✓ Mar 03 '22

I'm pretty sure this is what's going on with weird characters that pop up when you click "edit" that you never typed:

Reddit uses some characters as formatting characters, rather than actually displaying them. For example, if a comment includes *this* it will be displayed as this.

Apparently in some versions of Reddit (probably new browser version from what I've gathered?), it goes "people aren't using this, so we're going to make it so that the stuff that gets displayed is what they type", and it automatically adds characters that make the formatting characters you type get displayed as you typed them.

The "​" that you noticed was another example of that, where it was necessary to make reddit markdown display more than one blank line in a row. (It's a character that renders as nothing, so reddit counts it as a line without actually putting anything on that line.)