Sandwich Helix

Today's xkcd is brilliant.

When people share just the image from xkcd, I often point out that they're missing half the joke— often the best half. These cartoons always have an additional joke in the mouseover.

I particularly liked today's mouseover.

The number one rule of string manipulation is that you’ve got to specify your encodings.

It probably would have gotten the joke across to put any garbage into the string, but Randall Munroe went the extra mile and put the actual garbage that arises from a common encoding mismatch.

❯ iconv -f utf8 -t cp1252 <<< "you’ve"
you’ve

This strikes me as related to— but not quite the same as— my observation about Lightning Talks. Just as Cache::Reddit and sordid-map are real things you can download and run, this is a real encoding issue.

Nerdtastic!