The new WhatsApp Glitch
May 04, 2018
You may have received a message like this recently
If you touch theπblack point then your whatsapp will hang
β« ππ» t-touch here
... and once you touch the black button emoji on an Android phone, your WhatsApp will probably hang. Just like the message told you.
Explanation
It's actually really simple: Besides the actual text, the message includes around 6000 (invisible) unicode characters
If you touch theπblack point then your whatsapp will hang
β«<200e><200f><200e><200f><200e><200f><200e><200f><200e><200f><200e><200f>[...] ππ» t-touch here
- 200E is the code for LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK
- 200F is the code for RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK
If you include an even number of them, the text does obviously not change the direction and that's what the "author" of that message did.
I'm not sure why it causes WhatsApp to crash but I guess it's just unable to process that many direction changes because it's loading them all into memory (which has a physical limit) or something like that.
Why ~6000?
Because 6000 is the limit where WhatsApp displays a "read more..." button and it's probably enough to fill the memory of most phones in use today.Do it yourself
... or just copy the text from this textarea (click into it + press strg a + strg c) and insert it after any message.# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- ltr = u'\u200E' rtl = u'\u200F' ltr_rtl = ltr + rtl print(ltr_rtl * 1000)
$ python3 ltrrtl.py | xclip $ # all left to do is to paste your clipboard in WhatsApp Web
Those are 2000 characters in total, so there's enough space left for a personal message