Former dev here, can confirm on occasion it does.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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Allow me to introduce you to my favorite Unicode character, the zero width space
that sounds awesome! (there's 10k zero width spaces between the quotes ->''.)
Unless they work for Microsoft. Teams has been showing � instead of ä for the caller's name in the popup when someone calls for several weeks now. It didn't use to do that before. I don't think they care anymore.
I don't think it's even "they" any more.
I � Unicode!
I like this very much! It implies that the person expressing this knows exactly how they feel about Unicode. It's just us, the readers (or some other link in the chain), who have/ has the wrong encoding.
Ok calm down there Satan. Leave some chaos for the rest of us 😅
How would you do this in C? I'm a beginner. Does it entail checking/disallowing certain characters and data types? What? 😃
You wouldn't - what they're describing is called "SQL injection" - a way to fool poorly written web server code (regardless of what language it's writen in) into executing SQL code. The poorly written server code takes what's entered in a form field on a web page and pastes it into a skeleton of a SQL statement - in this case the text in the input field is SQL that ends the intended statement, followed by a new statement that deletes a table. For this to even work, the SQL skeleton on the server would have to be structured in just the right way so the modified version with the pasted-in text still makes sense. For this reason, hackers attempting SQL injection usually have to do a lot of trial and error to get something to happen. The only way it can work at all is if the server software handling the web page sends SQL commands to a database server as text, as if they're being typed in, and the server executes them. You can't inject C in this way because unlike SQL, C code isn't just executed, C programs have to be precompiled.
Many languages like C, Java, Python, etc allow you to construct SQL queries or SQL statements, where SQL is its own language used to communicate with a database, like Oracle or MySql, or Postgres or MSSQL. One way to do this is to construct a string in your language using whatever string functions, concatenation etc available in your language. The problem occurs because usually you want some kind of user input as one of the parameters in your sql query, in order to fetch the correct records the user is asking for. Like say a record ID or name. If you do not properly sanitize that ID or name which originally comes from some type of user input, then a malicious user could carefully craft an ID or name which includes their own SQL and other special characters, which will interfere with the query you intended to construct, and instead do something malicious. Like delete records or obtain records the user is not supposed to have access to.
There are many ways to guard against this, and you should learn about this when you start working with SQL and databases. It’s called a SQL injection.
There is another type of code injection which can occur if you are making exec() calls (or whatever your language uses) to run shell commands. Similar caution should be taken there.
I know what I'm dealing with when I see a query that isn't using a prepared statement.
I mean a prepared statement is still created with a string.
But you definitely want to be using bind parameters with your prepared statements. Not only for security but also potentially performance improvements.
How do you sanitize your inputs or how do you exploit inputs which are not sanitized.
Santize inputs.
I'll get back to you on exploits when I can write something that throws zero compilation errors. 😈
Couple big things are 1. Only accept reasonable characters, on a white list instead of rejecting bad characters based on a black list. This will mean you are less likely to forget to block /0 for example. 2. Understand how strings work and ensure both reading and writing to that string doesn't extend beyond the end of memory allocated for the string. For example do you understand what the /0 would do to a string your program accepts?
Sic! Thanks! I'll work on this this weekend! 😊
Keep in mind, the lowercase and uppercase letters are in continuous blocks on the ASCII table so you can can use that to verify if a char is a letter without doing an incredible long chain of if else statements.
I see little Bobby Tables is all grown up
[object Object]
What? My mother was a saint!
Yes?
You monster!
▞☒ę
Not always, but most times, yeah.
Pretty sure that's illegal here.
Depends on if it breaks the form and they get called. Actually if it gets through they might rightfully question their sanitation coding.
Actual monster
Calm down satan 😅
Can this really not be fixed?
I still see this in various text that's meant to be readable.
Usually ampersands are the biggest culprit, but is it just a really sacred data type that can't be upgraded to include punctuation, but can include the foreign looking wingdings that try to stand in for it?
I'm just confused on why those characters have multi character reference names that aren't part of the regular alphabet or punctuation set either, but those still show up instead of having room to just remove the erroneous reference with the actual character.
It's 2026, just dig out this fossil and fix it already.
the wrong UTF encoding is usually the issue
It's 2026, just dig out this fossil and fix it already.
That’s the joke. 😅