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Mac and iOS Bug Crashes Apps With a Single Indian-Language Character (mashable.com)

Posted by msmash on from the watch-out dept.

A lone Indian-language character is crashing a number of messaging apps on iOS, users are reporting. The problem also extends to the Apple Watch and even Macs, all of which struggle to process the character specific to the Telugu language spoken in India.

2 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. plaintext FTW, eh? by cellocgw · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Right on the heels of the article and discussion of plaintext vs. rich text vs. whateverthefuck Google is about to unleash on email comes this screwup.
    I say it's high time that any and all text-ish messaging systems require just plain ASCII characters and if people insist on using alternative alphabets they dang well should be required to paste them in as images, not Unicode 84E0DDC2834A or however big the field is these days.

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  2. Re: A UTF8 processing failure? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Unicode is broken, and most Unicode apps are even more broken.

    It's time we replaced Unicode. Make 32 bits the only encoding. Ditch all combinational characters. Separate out all merged languages. Create some solid libraries to handle it an convert UTF8/16.

    With Unicode you can't even reliably tell how long a string is. Most software that claims to support it is buggy as hell. Programmers can't be expected to become language experts.

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