this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
1301 points (99.2% liked)
Programmer Humor
31576 readers
2101 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Usually only happened when a French person copied and pasted their text directly from a Word document... dang weird spaces and accented characters... drove my boss mad when I told him it was because it French, and not a glitch.
Still had to work around it... text counters in textboxes had to account for accented characters, which took two bytes instead of one.
"I only have 2000 letters!" ... 2000 including 200 accent characters made it 2200 characters, not 2000.
I remember one day long ago when Notepad++ was the real shit, I was using the vertical selection feature and noticed that the selection was shorter on lines that had accented characters. I thought: "huh, accented characters count as two? What would happen if the selection ended in one? Can I select half a character?" no I could not and I had to restart my computer after trying.
Or, you could count it in Unicode characters, and not in whatever bizarro charset you're using over there. Then "À" is one character, just as it's supposed to be.
The problem typically comes from improper conversion between charsets. Like Windows-1252 to Unicode, or something equally horrible.
I was basically calculating in Javavscript then in PHP for validation before I sent it to Zoho.
The DB also was fine. It was honestly just PHP and Javascript. It's all good now though!
Not if the maximum is due to the database being configured to have a maximum space of 2000 bytes for that field.
Ah, well, bytes ≠ characters, but yes, that can certainly be an issue.
Easy. Just use utf-32 and make the text field a maximum of 500 letters. That will be a maximum of 2000 bytes, doesn't matter if the user is french or Chinese.
XD ahahah.