Fun with U̡̟ͩ̊̏ͬͯni͑c͐̀͢od̲̎ͅḕ̶̩͙͆

120-minute Workshop

More than emojis & umlauts: How UTF-8 Strings can confuse applications – and humans. Processing Unicode strings correctly is essential for applications.

Timetable

2:45 p.m. – 4:45 p.m. Friday 22nd

Room

Room D1+D2 - Track 7: Workshops

Audience

Everyone who'd like to learn about Unicode, especially if you have a diacritic in your name. 🦄

Required

A notebook or tablet, ideally with some Unicode-ready Programming language installed

Key-Learnings

  • Human language requires more characters than you assumed
  • What different kinds of spaces can be used for and when they're required
  • What makes a ’special character’ special?

Facts about Unicode and how they can be applied in testing

❧❦☙ Annoying customers by not accepting their input is expensive.

Imagine Jørn, the tester: He found a new tool to make his work much more straightforward and wanted to buy it.

However, when trying to enter his delivery and payment details, the website wouldn’t accept his entries. Instead, it displayed error messages:

* One field claimed: “Your name is invalid.”

* Another one said: “E-Mail too long.”

* The third one plainly complained: “Invalid input.”

Jørn may decide to buy from another website or use a different product. While claiming that a potential buyer’s name is invalid is rude and may cause you not to get the sale. Chances are high that Jørn takes his business to a place that can properly handle his name.

This workshop covers essential aspects of testing applications with processing Unicode in mind. After a definition and overview of Unicode, we will look deeper into UTF-8, the most used Unicode encoding. You can try out the concepts or ideas presented just before in exercises.

Among other topics, the activities will cover the following:

* different kinds of spaces

* ‘soft hyphens’ and other usually invisible characters

* a good number of ‘special characters.’ ❧❦☙

Related Sessions

Virtual Pass session
Fri, Nov 22 • 10:45 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Room F1 - Track 1: Talks

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Virtual Pass session
Thu, Nov 21 • 2:45 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Room F3 - Track 3: Talks

25-minute Talk

Wed, Nov 20 • 2:45 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.
Creative Space Room - Track 9: Bonus Sessions

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Tue, Nov 19 • 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.
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Full-Day Tutorial (6 hours)