Perfect. Awesome bug. Awesome Post Mortem. This was just fun to read. While this...

Someone1234 · on July 20, 2016

Well in this case a post contained 20K whitespaces, so I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that it was a mistake rather than intentional.

zymhan · on July 20, 2016

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how you even get 20,000 spaces into a Stack Exchange post, and how it would render in your browser.

randominion · on July 21, 2016

I can tell you how.

A shitty Belkin KVM in certain configurations can allow this to happen.

There's a bug which keeps generating chr(32) characters when you activate the keyboard shortcut (scroll lock twice), and try to switch to another machine.

It will keep pumping out those spaces on whatever fields was selected at the time, so if you take your time before you switch back, you are going to be in for a lot of fun.

Haven't read the link yet, but wanted to share this sooner than later.

datenwolf · on July 21, 2016

On a related note: Is there any easy way to tell Vim when in insert mode not to accept extra spaces at the end of a line, except a single one?

I've got of course checks in place that warn about trailing spaces and my Git hooks outright refuse a commit with trailing spaces. But it would be nice to catch that at the insert level.

You know, it may be cat who's typing.

duijf · on July 21, 2016

Not exactly at insert mode, but this may be helpful:

    autocmd BufWritePre * :%s/\s\+$//e

Before you save a file, it removes all trailing whitespace (ironically using the same regex as in the article -- hasn't given me trouble yet though)

vitd · on July 21, 2016

Nice find! Another one I heard about was that Microsoft's Windows keyboards, when used on a Mac, will sometimes insert a Control-P into the middle of your typing if you press the Windows key. Most apps just ignore it, but apparently not all!

krabpaaltje · on July 20, 2016

Bottle of tequila on the spacebar

kingisaac · on July 20, 2016

A bottle of Tres Commas?

jldugger · on July 20, 2016

Eh, just type a single space.

Then copy the entire post and paste it a couple dozen times.

htfy96 · on July 21, 2016

Only 35 keystrokes are required to get 20K+ spaces.[1]

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4606984/maximum-number-o...

gregd · on July 20, 2016

I'm thinking perhaps you didn't get the Silicon Valley reference?

jldugger · on July 21, 2016

Never got around to pirating it. My bad.

scoot · on July 21, 2016

Welcome to Reddit News.

jrockway · on July 21, 2016

I don't read anything programming-related on Reddit anymore, but are they also now too cool to watch TV?

OJFord · on July 20, 2016

It was in a multiline code block, so it just had a tonne of horizontal scroll.

See the edit: http://stackoverflow.com/revisions/38484433/2

hinkley · on July 21, 2016

If he had used tabs instead of spaces this wouldn't have been a problem.

scrollaway · on July 21, 2016

Or at the very least, trim whitespace on save :)

skeletonjelly · on July 20, 2016

Still hasn't killed as many characters as GRRM

skeletonjelly · on July 20, 2016

Good find! Where did you see this? Or was it in the comments via Nick Craver?

OJFord · on July 21, 2016

The article said:

    > The malformed post contained roughly 20,000 consecutive
    > characters of whitespace on a comment line that started
    > with -- play happy sound for player to enjoy. For us,
    > the sound was not happy.

So I just searched:

    https://www.google.co.uk/search?q="play+happy+sound+for+player+to+enjoy"+site%3Astackoverflow.com

GnarlyWhale · on July 21, 2016

"deleted 20507 characters in body"

Hahaha

xirdstl · on July 20, 2016

Cat laying its head on the spacebar.

Mine does that on the Control key all the time.

nxzero · on July 20, 2016

At least it wasn't a squirrel... http://www.citylab.com/design/2016/01/map-squirrel-cyberatta...

jandrese · on July 20, 2016

Browsers typically collapse whitespace, so it probably would render as a single space.

dingaling · on July 20, 2016

I frequently complete eBay feedback 'comments' fields[0] with a variety of Unicode spaces and Firefox at least doesn't seem to collapse them.

[0] eBay insists on something being entered and when it was a routine transaction with a vendor I seldom have anything useful to say.

olympus · on July 20, 2016

Not sure if you're a frequent eBayer, but the common behavior in that community is just "A+++++++++" with some arbitrary number of "+" indicating that everything went fine.

MyNameIsFred · on July 21, 2016

He's no doubt observed that and is using whitespace to rail against the ridiculousness of that convention.

KyleBrandt · on July 20, 2016

was in code tags, so had a very long horizontal scroll bar :P

_ao789 · on July 21, 2016

Not in a pre....

danek · on July 21, 2016

I wouldn't jump to any conclusion ;)

But I do know that tools often make it easy for people do incredibly stupid things by accident. Like the 'sudo remove file' command followed by '-rf' in the wrong place. I rimraf a lot; it's very useful. It's a miracle I haven't wiped out any computers doing so...

surething · on July 20, 2016

I think it'd be possible to inject this kind of thing into your code if you're just starting out with vim, aren't cognisant of all commands you invoke, and then copy/paste all code straight into a browser.

hafreni · on July 20, 2016

Yeah, I agree, when starting out with VIM, my spacing and tab usage was inconsistent at best.

abrookewood · on July 20, 2016

Have to agree. I read a Post Incident Review like this and I'm like "Yep, totally see how that could happen. Thanks for solving it and thanks for letting me know why it happened".