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rated 0 times [  148] [ 4]  / answers: 1 / hits: 34469  / 9 Years ago, sun, july 19, 2015, 12:00:00

I was baffled when a colleague showed me this line of JavaScript alerting 42.





alert(2+ 40);





It quickly turns out that what looks like a minus sign is actually an arcane Unicode character with clearly different semantics.



This left me wondering why that character doesn't produce a syntax error when the expression is parsed. I'd also like to know if there are more characters behaving like this.


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16

That character is OGHAM SPACE MARK, which is a space character. So the code is equivalent to alert(2+ 40).




I'd also like to know if there are more characters behaving like this.




Any Unicode character in the Zs class is a white space character in JavaScript, but there don't seem to be that many.



However, JavaScript also allows Unicode characters in identifiers, which lets you use interesting variable names like ಠ_ಠ.


[#65756] Thursday, July 16, 2015, 9 Years  [reply] [flag answer]
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