[object Object]
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
184 points (99.5% liked)
Programmer Humor
32000 readers
1744 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Seeing this actually sent a small wave of dread through my body
Why is it that whenever something is spitting out junk data, those specific characters are involved?
� is used to represent an invalid character, so it makes sense that it'd appear often when bad data is being rendered (or good data is being rendered improperly).
Everything is 0s and 1s to a computer. What a pattern of 0s and 1s encodes is decided by people--often arbitrarily. Over the years there have been attempts to standardize encodings but, for legacy reasons, older encodings are still valid.
The 0s and 1s that encode ' in UTF-8 (a standardized encoding) are the same 0s and 1s that encode ’ in CP-1252 (a legacy encoding).
The � symbol is shown when the 0s and 1s don't encode anything of meaning.