A stray "j" ruined my evening
napkins.mtmn.nameA 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>
On seeing just the title, before reading the article, I assumed it was about the Wingdings J.
Seemed to be a common occurrence from Microsoft Outlook users.
I remember discovering this in about 2010, and thought it was hilarious
> but in ANSI newline delimiter is translated as "j"
?
This comes up fairly often in TeX, where you can use ^^J to insert a newline character [0]. For example, the following code:
prints the following message:\message{before ^^J after}
This is common in other old software too [1] [2], but TeX is where I see it the most often these days.before after[0]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/64848/270600
\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.
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.
> \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-...
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'
> \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.
Yes, but piping output containing newlines into wl-copy does not result in j's in the clipboard.
Yeah, I don't understand this. What broken tool is turning newlines into j?
So this is a bug in that Signal TUI he was using? I.e. it mangles newlines in pasted text.
Impossible, Signal TUI is written in Rust.
I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or not. I chuckled either way.
I like how -j fixed the stray j problem....
Today I learned that jq -Rrj is a shorter command line for doing the same as tr -d '\n'.
IIRC you don’t even need the -r flag since -j incorporates its behavior (minus newlines).