[SOLVED] Some websites render the object replacement character

benm · 2022-04-05 13:12:18

Unicode Character “” (U+FFFC) is often displayed on websites. A common example is Facebook posts. The behavior is the same on both Brave and Firefox browsers. However, from a separate Windows PC running Brave, the OBJ character is not displayed on the same content. Contextually, it appears the OBJ character is in the place where whitespace characters should be.

I am not sure where to begin research on why this is taking place and could use some direction. While this problem is not a huge deal, I would like to better understand what is happening.

Last edited by benm (2022-04-05 21:01:07)

Scimmia · 2022-04-05 13:13:31

You're asking about Brave on Windows? Here?

seth · 2022-04-05 13:26:43

Do you have an actual example url?

benm · 2022-04-05 13:44:23

Scimmia wrote:

You're asking about Brave on Windows? Here?

No. I am asking about a problem that occurs from two different browsers on Arch but does not occur on Windows. I checked a Windows installation as a test.

Example URL
https://www.facebook.com/mscottfoster/p … 0017456060

Screenshot of URL
https://imgur.com/a/PEIch7i

seth · 2022-04-05 13:49:05

Screenshots won't help - this is likely a placeholder for some data object that your browser can't handle.
Please post some url that's not facebook. And don't ask "why" unless you're ready for a lot of foul mouthed swearing about the downfall of mankind.

Scimmia · 2022-04-05 14:00:08

What character is supposed to be displayed there?

benm · 2022-04-05 14:11:35

It has been a while since I have come across it from somewhere besides facebook. If I had a hunch I think it involves the way that Apple devices handle text encoding by default and it being pasted onto the web. Outside of sites that have lots of user generated content, it is much more rare. I'm fine doing whatever reading I need on the topic of text encoding, I am just not sure where to begin.

seth · 2022-04-05 14:21:03

The web inspector, right-click it and say "Inspect"
It'll tell you about the element and the context and everything else.

benm · 2022-04-05 14:28:25

<div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">Father son bonding</div>

Note that as I view this from inside of Brave the OBJ character is not visible. As I paste it into this text box now it is visible.

The character appears between the "g" in bonding and the "<" sign in the </div>

Last edited by benm (2022-04-05 14:29:23)

seth · 2022-04-05 14:33:00

You may have noticed that the post doesn't include it.
Please copy and paste it into a file and upload that:

curl -F 'file=@-' 0x0.st < /tmp/failbook.error

The question is btw. rather common on google and pretty much tied to failbook, w/ speculation ranging from "unresolvable emoji" to "censorship"…

benm · 2022-04-05 14:38:28

I did not realize it was mainly a Facebook specific issue, at which point I do not really care very much about solving it. My search failures were because I was searching for issues with OBJ characters on Linux rather than the specific issue on facebook. I was mainly more interested in knowing if there was some type of configuration issue I was having with Arch, but since that is likely not the case I am not going to invest much time trying to solve a problem related to Facebook's bad design.

Trilby · 2022-04-05 18:52:04

FYI, I can replicate the problem, and from downloading the source of that url I can see the "Father son bonding" phrase appears *many* times in the html/js source. In several cases there is the non visible unicode FFFC character there that shows up as empty space in vim, but by putting the cursor over it I can confirm the character code. But in several other places the phrase also appears in JSON data values, e.g.,

"articleBody":"Father son bonding\ufffc"

As seen here, that unicode value was encoded into it by facebook before transmitting it over the wire. So this has nothing to do with fonts or our browsers*, but its just facebook doing something ridiculous (so par for the course).

*note, in a sense it could depend in part on the browser as FB could very well transmit different data based on the user agent or other browser detection mechanisms it uses. But this character is present with my qt6-webengine browser as well as in the source code grabbed via curl. You could tinker with curl sending alternative user agents if you want to see if that affects it - but regardless this comes from FB's end.

(edit: using an iPhone user agent string w/ curl doesn't change the result)

Last edited by Trilby (2022-04-05 18:59:23)

benm · 2022-04-05 21:00:27

This is great info Trilby. I'll close the thread as solved. Glad to know this is just Facebook stupidity.

Arch Linux

#1 2022-04-05 13:12:18

[SOLVED] Some websites render the object replacement character

#2 2022-04-05 13:13:31

Re: [SOLVED] Some websites render the object replacement character

#3 2022-04-05 13:26:43

Re: [SOLVED] Some websites render the object replacement character

#4 2022-04-05 13:44:23

Re: [SOLVED] Some websites render the object replacement character

#5 2022-04-05 13:49:05

Re: [SOLVED] Some websites render the object replacement character

#6 2022-04-05 14:00:08

Re: [SOLVED] Some websites render the object replacement character

#7 2022-04-05 14:11:35

Re: [SOLVED] Some websites render the object replacement character

#8 2022-04-05 14:21:03

Re: [SOLVED] Some websites render the object replacement character

#9 2022-04-05 14:28:25

Re: [SOLVED] Some websites render the object replacement character

#10 2022-04-05 14:33:00

Re: [SOLVED] Some websites render the object replacement character

#11 2022-04-05 14:38:28

Re: [SOLVED] Some websites render the object replacement character

#12 2022-04-05 18:52:04

Re: [SOLVED] Some websites render the object replacement character

#13 2022-04-05 21:00:27

Re: [SOLVED] Some websites render the object replacement character

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