The shortest pull request ever

[djha-skin]

> If we drop those markers (1110 and 10 in front of bytes) and keep the remaining bits we're left with 1111111011111111, which evaluates to 65279, which is in hexadecimal 0xfeff. Yes, you recognize it, it's a BOM. Because yes a BOM is just a ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE, isn't it beautiful?

Byte Order Marks have stolen hours and days of my life. Anyone suffering the pain of developing on a windows box can relate. Windows puts BOMs by default in the front of every file. Thus windows programs silently ignore it, but then linux machines run the program and choke on the BOM. You have to specifically ask the editor if the BOM is even there, it doesn't show up in the editor by default. I have specific lines in my .vimrc[1] that prevent BOMs from ruining my day/week, but they still pop up often. I often joke there will be a byte order mark on my tombstone, along with avahi daemon.

1: https://git.sr.ht/~djha-skin/dotfiles/tree/main/item/dot-con...

[ddalcino]

> Byte Order Marks have stolen hours and days of my life.

Me too, to some degree. I have discovered them in a Ruby code base at work, in the middle of a line of code (copy pasted), where the Ruby interpreter thinks they are undeclared identifiers. When the code runs, it throws an exception every time that complains of “Undeclared identifier `‘”.

The dad-joke of it is that “You gotta sweep for BOMs before they blow up your code.”

[jftuga]

I have written a cross platform, stand alone CLI program to inspect a file for BOM8 and BOM16. It also detects if a file uses CRLF or LF. Tab and nul characters are also evaluated. Please see the Examples in my repo:

https://github.com/jftuga/chars

[TillE]

I've dealt with two elusive bugs which were ultimately caused by Windows stupidly using UTF-8 with BOM by default. Python requires you to take extra steps to decode that garbage, and some C++ libraries can't handle it at all.

I'm sure there were good reasons that BOM sounded like the right idea at Microsoft, but everyone else just used straight UTF-8 and it was fine.

[AceJohnny2]

> along with avahi daemon

Tell us more!

[Am4TIfIsER0ppos]

> nobomb

Sounds like that is a good choice for the option name

[donatj]

Over the years I've submitted a decent number of pull requests just removing execute bits from files that shouldn't be executable.

They always end up +0-0 - see:

https://github.com/ICanBoogie/Inflector/pull/38

[christiangenco]

My high school english classes would upload any papers students wrote to a site that would check for plagiarism. I figured out that if I inserted random zero-width no-break spaces in the middle of words my plagiarism score would drop to zero.

Presumably the plagiarism system was just looking for exact matches of long substrings.

[benj111]

Somewhere someone is adding long lines of BOMs just so if someone else adds long lines of BOMs it gets flagged as plagiarism.

I hope it returns the copied string.

String "" is plagiarised

[donatj]

Interesting. You could presumably also swap out characters for homoglyphs at random.

[frabjoused]

The original creator of the first zero width space had to be evil.

[mr337]

Wow, this is pretty nifty and I would, nor would the program authors thing of that use case :D

[verandaguy]

I mean, it's the shortest _possible_ pull request (since I don't think you can make a git diff of zero bytes, barring some weird quirk), but also probably has the highest PR description : PR diff length ratio of any PR I've seen.

[AceJohnny2]

Working in embedded, I've seen commits that changed a single bit with pages and pages of background explanation :D

[dixie_land]

I think file mode changes (eg 0644 -> 0755 to fix a script not running) could be smaller

[silverwind]

`git commit --allow-empty -m 'empty commit'` will do.

[layer8]

Given that a BOM is three bytes, I don’t really agree that it’s the shortest. How about replacing a CRLF by LF? That one is invisible in many contexts as well.

[mjochim]

Depends on whether you consider `git commit --allow-empty` a weird quirk ... I guess it would be reasonable to do so ;).

[k470]

I love the title. I like to ask for pull requests with this exact description to influence my coleagues to look at it faster when it's something small like a single character. For example, when it's a two character PR I say "hey, the second smallest pr in the world". Guess I was wrong!

[remram]

You can easily check in your CI that your files are ASCII (code should probably be) with file(1). There is probably an off-the-shelf-tool that can validate that all characters are printable, ASCII or unicode.

[pabs3]

Is there a tool to check for byte order marks, zero width spaces and other "weird" Unicode characters?

[jftuga]

I wrote a cross platform, stand alone cli program to do this.

It determines the end-of-line format, tabs, bom, and nul characters:

https://github.com/jftuga/chars

[tmaly]

Jesus wept