The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[Mathimagics]

⌘ ⌘ ⌘ ⌘ ⌘

Those of you who play Wordle will be familiar with the SHARE button, which lets you paste your results into an email ...

Some of you may have noticed that you can, of course, tweak those results before sending them on. So instead of a 5/6 result (less than stellar) you can simply change that to a 2/6 (say), and delete 3 of the "guess" results.

Soul-corroding, but simple ...

Interestingly, you can also paste the SHARE results directly into a forum post, and they should be clearly visible. But there's a catch - you can only do this in PREVIEW mode, you can't actually SUBMIT the post.

The guess results are in "emoji" form - each coloured square corresponds to a 2 or 4 byte "font char code", and the browser translates the codes into images. More or less!

If you right-click on any individual square in the email, you can get the link to the corresponding image. See the images below for examples.

Attempting to submit a post containing these weird font codes gives the forum server some sort of hernia, possibly related to the word-indexing functions ...

[ceptimus]

I think it's a MySQL problem which means that the forum database can't handle Unicode characters. I tried to post my Sudoffle results and saw a MySQL error message and the post rejected. I think the MySQL error message said that it was using MySQL 4.x which is very old (2004 or earlier). Newer releases of MySQL (or its open source equivalents, such as MariaDB) are configured out of the box to handle Unicode. It may be possible to alter the configuration of even MySQL 4 to handle Unicode, but it's most likely quicker, easier, and better, to upgrade the database server.

Of course, there's no need to go to the trouble of doing that just to allow Wordle (and similar) results to be posted; but it's probably a good idea to consider updating the very obsolete version of MySQL at some stage anyway.