I don't know if this has been shared before, or if anyone will find it useful, but I thought I would post this anyway.
Chaturbate (and I assume other sites) have a blacklist of words that cannot appear in a bio; words like "rape", "incest", etc. But the other day I wanted to include a playlist with the song "Young Lust" by Pink Floyd... only young is one of the words on Chaturbate's blacklist. While it is possible to rephrase things to avoid blacklisted words, what am I supposed to do in this case? Use "Not Old Lust" by Pink Floyd?
Fortunately, HTML allows a character to be written using its character code. Without going into too much geeky detail a computer represents letters as numbers; e.g. the number for 'lower case letter A' is 97, a space character is 32, and a 'lower case letter O' is 111, etc. To specify a character using it's character code prefix the number with '&#' and add a ';' to the end. So we can write a 'lower case letter O' as o and a browser will display it as 'o'.
So 'young' and 'young' will look exactly the same in a user's browser, but only the first one is rejected by Chaturbate.
I've put some examples in a Code Pen and Wikipedia has a list of most Unicode character codes. As always, W3 Schools has a good section on HTML Entities.
In the spirit of full disclosure I should ping @punker barbie and let her know that Chaturbate's HTML sanitizing code is broken, but hopefully they won't fix it if we promise not to use this trick for evil
Chaturbate (and I assume other sites) have a blacklist of words that cannot appear in a bio; words like "rape", "incest", etc. But the other day I wanted to include a playlist with the song "Young Lust" by Pink Floyd... only young is one of the words on Chaturbate's blacklist. While it is possible to rephrase things to avoid blacklisted words, what am I supposed to do in this case? Use "Not Old Lust" by Pink Floyd?
Fortunately, HTML allows a character to be written using its character code. Without going into too much geeky detail a computer represents letters as numbers; e.g. the number for 'lower case letter A' is 97, a space character is 32, and a 'lower case letter O' is 111, etc. To specify a character using it's character code prefix the number with '&#' and add a ';' to the end. So we can write a 'lower case letter O' as o and a browser will display it as 'o'.
So 'young' and 'young' will look exactly the same in a user's browser, but only the first one is rejected by Chaturbate.
I've put some examples in a Code Pen and Wikipedia has a list of most Unicode character codes. As always, W3 Schools has a good section on HTML Entities.
In the spirit of full disclosure I should ping @punker barbie and let her know that Chaturbate's HTML sanitizing code is broken, but hopefully they won't fix it if we promise not to use this trick for evil
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