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Comment by tyteen4a03 | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: If you have the exclamation mark (!) in your Windows username, Java will think it's the jar separator and `getResourceAsStream` will refuse to work. This broke many people's Minecraft installation over the years.

The bug in question [0] was reported in 2001 and remains unsolved 20 years later.

[0] https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4523159

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I find the very idea of putting an exclamation mark on one's username and not expecting eventual problems to be quite curious.

I find the idea of expecting names from other cultures to follow the customs of one's culture to be quite curious.

https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...

(but, in any case, this discussion here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567548 provides some nuance)

It should not cause issues. For regular users, it should be an expectation that, in well-written software, it won't cause issues. But in our world of power+ users... It will cause issues. It just will. Maybe in some number of decades that won't be the case, but it's irrelevant right now.

With your programmer hat on, sure. But as a user and annoyed programmer, it's a disgrace that the contents of your username is treated as anything but a totally opaque string. It's like saying that of course putting semicolons into web forms will break them: not novel, still horrifying.

The Nama language has a letter that is often replaced with an exclamation mark in common typography. The lead actor in the film The God's Must be Crazy was named N!xau ǂToma

When you start a Windows computer for the first time, Windows gives you a text box and asks you to choose a user name. It does not explain in detail what this means or what it is for.

Does it really surprise you that people are going to type just about anything into that box that it will allow?

i recommend reading this "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names". world is crazy place if you expect some system in how people name each other and are writing it down.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

It can be used to indicate a click sound in some languages and the IPA. Probably not the most common reason to come across this bug but it's a case worth considering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclamation_mark#Phonetics

Quite a lot of languages use ! or ? as a letter. For example in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark#Indigenous_langu...

That looks like an example of languages using ? to represent a different but similar looking character.

! is actually used as a regular letter with a phonetic value to write quite a few languages in Africa, usually representing a click sound. It's even in the name of some of them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C7%83Kung_languages

Really? If someone asked you if exclamation marks in usernames would cause problems before you were aware of this, would you have said yes? It's a very common special character, it's not like it's a control character or some obscure unicode thing. Besides, it's a common thing to add to usernames outside of services where you use your real name.

Absolutely, I would have said yes to the question "do exclamation marks have the potential to cause problems in some piece of software or other, the likelihood going way up with the number and the obscurity of software you use on this machine".

Whether this seems like an issue may depend on whether it's a significant character on OSes you've used.

well, a username can reasonably be limited to [a-zA-Z0-9_] but a name field should take Unicode

I just find it annoying, much like the fact that Unix shell still has trouble dealing with spaces in things.

Simply install the game into %ProgramData%

Classic java

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