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Comment by somewhatjustin | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I'm Justin, creator of My Smoothie Stack. I'm a new developer so I'm grateful for any feedback on my source code [0].

Here's my personal recipe [1].

If you take a look at that URL, you'll see it's quite long. I wanted to be able to share recipes, but I don't have any backend knowledge. I had to get creative and store the object representing the recipe in an object encoded in Base64. This presented some character escaping issues, but those were manageable.

I don't expect this project to change the world. I just wanted a way to practice my newfound React skills and share some smoothie recipes. If you give this a try, please share your recipe!

Thanks for your time!

[0] https://github.com/somewhatJustin/smoothie-stack/

[1] https://mysmoothiestack.com/?share=eyJpbmdyZWRpZW50cyI6WyJGc...

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Congratulations on your launch!

> This presented some character escaping issues, but those were manageable.

In case you were interested, there's a section devoted to that in RFC 3548: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3548#section-4 with the tl;dr of `s/[+]/-/; s/[/]/_/` and then omitting the trailing "=" characters and just padding the incoming b64 since (AFAIK) one can add as many "=" as they'd like and it'll just ignore extra ones

Depending on your interoperability interests, you can shave a bit of text out of it by shortening the JSON key names `"i"`, `"a"`, `"n"`, and then also `.filter(Boolean)` to nuke those two trailing empty strings

> In case you were interested, there's a section devoted to that in RFC 3548: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3548#section-4 with the tl;dr of `s/[+]/-/; s/[/]/_/` and then omitting the trailing "=" characters and just padding the incoming b64 since (AFAIK) one can add as many "=" as they'd like and it'll just ignore extra ones

Just to add one thing: in case Justin isn't familiar, "s/original_thing/replacement_thing" is a figure of speech often used in the hacker subculture to mean "replace original_thing with replacement_thing." It comes from some languages and editors like Perl and Vim/vi, where that syntax (and variations) are used for search and replace.

Thanks for clarifying, I was not aware!

Thanks for taking a look!

Thanks! I'll check this out.

> Depending on your interoperability interests, you can shave a bit of text out of it by shortening the JSON key names `"i"`, `"a"`, `"n"`, and then also `.filter(Boolean)` to nuke those two trailing empty strings

This is a good idea. I might already be filtering those empty strings but I'll have to check.

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