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The worst bug I've ever encountered was a JS file that kept not running, with very cryptic and hard to understand trace that made no sense. TypeScript and other
by epolanski 2y ago
The worst bug I've ever encountered was a JS file that kept not running, with very cryptic and hard to understand trace that made no sense. TypeScript and others parsed it fine without any issues.
After 3 days of literally trying everything, I don't know why, I thought of rewriting the file character by character by hand and it worked. What was happening?
Eventually opened the two files side by side in a hex editor and here it is: several exotic unicode characters for "empty" space.
- skeaker 2y agoI've seen this happen as the result of errant copy-pasting.
- shoo 2y agoI've seen this happen in enterprise systems integration work, where some data interchange spec is authored as a Word document, and it has tables defining valid string values for certain fields, and Word helpfully replaces plain ascii dashes in the string constants with pretty long dashes, and team A builds their side hand-typing these constants as plain ascii, and team B builds their side by copy-pasting the exact unicode strings out of the Word doc. Not a hard thing to debug once the issue is noticed, and completely preventable (write specs in plain text).
- wglb 2y agoSo curious if this added a trick to your debugging toolbox?