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A stray "j" ruined my evening

35 points

by birdculture

4 days ago

| past

| 6 comments

| napkins.mtmn.name

| HN

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Cyykratahk

2 hours ago

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A stray "J" I encountered years ago: a certain client's support tickets would often end with a single "J", which was a little confusing as it was not one of their name initials. After a brief investigation, the original email source contained this:

    <font face="Wingdings">J</font>

Which renders as a smiley face.

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TRiG_Ireland

55 minutes ago

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On seeing just the title, before reading the article, I assumed it was about the Wingdings J.

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geerlingguy

1 hour ago

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Seemed to be a common occurrence from Microsoft Outlook users.

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sevenseacat

1 hour ago

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I remember discovering this in about 2010, and thought it was hilarious

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mike_hock

5 hours ago

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> but in ANSI newline delimiter is translated as "j"

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ralferoo

5 hours ago

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\n is ^J (ctrl-J) so there's some logic there, but I wonder if something has been lost in the message. I'd guess it either displays ^J or an inverse-colour J, rather than just a plain lowercase j.

Also possible that the j is a red herring and just some random character that's always there. Pasting a URL containing a newline into most browsers just truncates it at the newline, regardless of how much text is after. I only know this from occasionally copying links from a terminal window where the copy somehow added newlines every 80 characters (even though copying this way normally works fine). I'd have to copy the URL with newlines into a text editor, remove the new lines and copy again to be able to paste it.

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randallsquared

3 hours ago

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Some tool or library is interpreting the newline as two characters (as you note), and then a subsequent step is removing unprintable characters. Things like this used to frequently happen in shells, Perl, PHP, and so on.

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rgoulter

2 hours ago

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> \n is ^J (ctrl-J) so there's some logic there

The same 'j' as vi uses for 'hjkl'. https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/42426/why-did-vi-use-...

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microgpt

1 hour ago

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also the same 'j' found in words like 'jujuism', 'jejunities', and 'bejeezus', also by a magical coincidence the same one in most Latin fonts, and even some random text strings such as 'pj$4'

But I suppose you're saying ASCII 10 was chosen as newly because it aligns with the down arrow on keyboards of the time. Maybe.

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thaumasiotes

4 hours ago

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> \n is ^J (ctrl-J) so there's some logic there

Specifically, J is the 10th letter of the alphabet and therefore ctrl-J is code for ascii 10. Same reason ctrl-D sends EOF and ctrl-I sends tab.

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mike_hock

4 hours ago

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Yes, but piping output containing newlines into wl-copy does not result in j's in the clipboard.

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gucci-on-fleek

2 hours ago

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This comes up fairly often in TeX, where you can use ^^J to insert a newline character [0]. For example, the following code:

  \message{before ^^J after}

prints the following message:

  before 
  after

This is common in other old software too [1] [2], but TeX is where I see it the most often these days.

[0]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/64848/270600

[1]: https://superuser.com/q/212874

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caret_notation

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raldi

1 hour ago

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Yeah, I don't understand this. What broken tool is turning newlines into j?

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meindnoch

5 hours ago

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So this is a bug in that Signal TUI he was using? I.e. it mangles newlines in pasted text.

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neonz80

4 hours ago

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Impossible, Signal TUI is written in Rust.

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irishcoffee

1 hour ago

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I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or not. I chuckled either way.

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baruchel

5 hours ago

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https://zippythepinhead.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PRO...

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benj111

5 hours ago

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I like how -j fixed the stray j problem....

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rav

4 hours ago

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Today I learned that jq -Rrj is a shorter command line for doing the same as tr -d '\n'.

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stouset

1 hour ago

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IIRC you don’t even need the -r flag since -j incorporates its behavior (minus newlines).

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weare138

40 minutes ago

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I was poking around with this and I noticed wl-copy has an option to trim newlines. Maybe that's why they added the option but I'm leaning towards gurk being the culprit. wl-copy itself seems to handle newlines ok, at least for me. This works as expected:

  echo -e "test\n" | wl-copy

  wl-paste