It is likely not worth your effort as whatever you come up with will likely result in discord deactivating your account for breaking their ToS, or them breaking their API forcing you to constantly play catch-up.

This is why open communication protocols are so important. Email is still as ubiquitous as it is because it’s a protocol, not an API.

I personally think it would be less overall effort to get your friends to switch to an open protocol like matrix, or XMPP than it would playing cat and mouse with proprietary APIs. But you do you, I wish you the best of luck!

Best I can do is

"\ude41🙂".split("").reverse().join("")

returns "\ude42🙁"

Yeah good point. I suppose the problem is this function that operates on numbers allows numeric strings to be passed in in the first place. The only place where I would really expect numeric strings to exist is captured directly from user input which is where the parsing into a numeric data type should happen, not randomly in a library function.

On my machine at least man openssl shows that -k is for specifying the password you want to derive the key from, so in that case I think you are literally using the string /etc/ssl/private/etcBackup.key as the password. I think the flag you want is -kfile.

You can verify this by running the command in strace and seeing that there is no openat call for the file passed to -k.

Edit: metiulekm@sh.itjust.works beat me to it while I was writing out my answer :)

It’s kind of insane how bad this whole is-number thing is. It’s designed to tell you if a string is numeric, but I would argue if you’re ever using that you have a fundamental design problem. I hate dynamic typing as much as anyone else, but if forced to use it I would at least try to have some resemblance of sanity by just normalizing it to an actual number first.

Just fucking do this…

const toRegexRange = (minStr, maxStr, options) => {
  const min = parseInt(minStr, 10);
  const max = parseInt(maxStr, 10);
  if (isNaN(min) || isNaN(max)) throw Error("bad input or whatever");
  // ...

Because of the insanity of keeping them strings and only attempting to validate them (poorly) up front you open yourself up to a suite of bugs. For example, it took me all of 5 minutes to find this bug:

toRegexRange('+1', '+2')
// returns "(?:+1|+2)" which is not valid regexp

Ah yeah I don’t know how I would do that easily on a phone. Do those in my example above render for you? You should probably be able to just copy/paste them on a phone if they do.

I can’t find a keyboard with them, or a copy/pastable line where they’ve been typed

Maybe use combining diacritical marks?

I’m using 0x326 (Combining Comma Below), but you may need the CGJ in there to render correctly in all contexts

e.g.

Foo!̦ Bar?̦

Edit: Combining grapheme joiner, not zero width joiner

Good for you, you have a short list of requirements out of a chat service and discord perfectly fills your niche. But different people have different requirements for chat, and they don’t align. And network effects force people who have differing requirements to use the service with the most users which sucks.

For instance here are things that I require from any chat service that I use that discord completely falls flat at:

• Ability to run it on my linux machine without using an electron client (npm is a huge mess of supply chain attacks and I refuse to run any software that is likely to contain dependencies from it)
• Ability to run it on my AOSP phone which does not have any google play services installed
• Ability to write software to back up messages without fear of a company changing their API and breaking my backup system