this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
1296 points (99.2% liked)

Programmer Humor

31576 readers
2154 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

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Kojichan@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (7 children)

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.

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 5 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

“I only have 2000 letters!” … 2000 including 200 accent characters made it 2200 characters, not 2000.

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.

[–] calcopiritus@lemmy.world 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Not if the maximum is due to the database being configured to have a maximum space of 2000 bytes for that field.

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 2 points 21 hours ago

Ah, well, bytes ≠ characters, but yes, that can certainly be an issue.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)