vscode unfortunately highlights unexpected unicode characters
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Unfortunately?
Harder to prank someone when it highlights it
Ok, put it into an excel formula then.
Non-native English speaker telling on themselves.
(Excel only uses semicolons instead of commas in locales where they would collide with the decimal comma)
Not quite telling. We have customers from various countries.
; and ; respectively, in case anyone wants to see how it renders on their machine and is also lazy.
My IDE says: '(', '+', '-', '.', ';', <operator>, '[' or '}' expected, got ';'
But the rust compiler explains
error: unknown start of token: \u{37e}
help: Unicode character ';' (Greek Question Mark) looks like ';' (Semicolon), but it is not```
what a killjoy.But the rust compiler explains
If this is true then rust deserves all the praise it gets
Rust's compiler is pretty much the reason the language gets so much praise. The borrow checking of course is the major reason, but it's great at hints too.
While the language can be hard to get used to, the error messages are mostly great.
But sometimes you can send it on a goose chase with impossible type inference.
This is pretty cool. But my question is if the compiler knows it’s basically the same thing visually, why doesn’t it treat it the same way as far as syntax and just make them functionally equivalent;
Because then logically extending this you end up with JavaScript, where "1"==1 and it's super hard to reason about what will/should happen
silently closes IntelliJ and vim, opens PyCharm
As if a white space sensitive language protects from this fuckery.
- How many thin spaces are one level of indentation?
- Will anyone notice a hair space?
- Who can tell the difference between a space and a figure space? they are the same size in a mono spaced font
It must really suck to work as a Java developer in Greece.
Vscode might but what about llms asking for a friend
Since they're fundamentally predicting the next token, and there isn't a lot of training data out there that would actually do this, I wouldn't expect that LLMs are going to start putting in lookalike characters. They only lookalike to humans.
That said, you could probably poison their training datasets this way.
Yeah that was the idea get the llms to start using look alike characters to poison their outputs.
Why do characters like this even exist? I've run into this before where I couldn't find a file I'd downloaded by searching for it. I remembered what folder it was in and checked it was still there, after playing around with the name for a bit I realised the "a" in the file name wasn't actually an a.
Simple answer is that Unicode is a design by committee attempting to make every single human written language work. It's more complicated than it needs to be, but we also don't want to redo all the work it would take to replace it with something more sane. Especially KJC languages. Trying to get those three to agree on anything is for people who deal with frustration better than me.