#Using cardhop mac
It doesn’t seem necessary for Contacts to do this for all Mac users, however.
So while it seems weird that Apple designed Contacts to enclose every phone number in those zero-width characters, it does protect phone numbers pasted into right-to-left text flows from being changed.
#Using cardhop code
If nothing else, filtering user input is an essential security practice because attackers will often try to feed a system data to inject malicious code or to cause buffer overflows that could be exploited. A phone number field has no reason to accept invisible punctuation characters, so it’s good programming practice to drop them.
Why don’t these characters cause more problems? When developers design apps that accept data, they generally create input filters that filter out unwanted data. (Some subsequent research turned up an Ask Different thread that describes the problem-which has been reported to Apple as a bug-and confirms that it still exists in macOS 13.1 Ventura.) Finally, the issue is limited to Contacts on the Mac the problem doesn’t afflict phone numbers copied from an iPhone or iPad in my testing. They’re also unique to the phone number fields a number stored in the Notes field won’t have them either. I don’t believe Contacts is adding those characters to the numbers as part of the copy because if you select a few characters in the middle of a number and then copy and paste them into Terminal, the invisible characters won’t be present. Dave speculated that those characters exempt the phone number from the surrounding text flow direction, which would be right-to-left with Hebrew and Arabic, for instance.Ĭontacts appears to store those characters with the phone number, but since they’re zero-width, there’s no way to avoid selecting them that I was able to find. It turns out that Contacts on the Mac encloses all phone numbers in two zero-width (and thus invisible) Unicode characters: U+202D (LEFT-TO-RIGHT OVERRIDE) and U+202C (POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING). It looked the same as his version, but when he copied and pasted the number from the Messages thread, the form accepted it! What was going on?ĭave was planning to use a Python script in Terminal to compare the number he had from Contacts with the one his friend had sent, but when he pasted his number into Terminal, the problem revealed itself instantly, as you can see in the highlighted text in my test below, which shows extra characters on either side of the phone number. So Dave texted his friend at the number, which worked fine, and asked her to send him the number exactly as she would give it to a French person. Nor did pasting as plain text make any difference.
#Using cardhop verification
Pasting the number into a few online verification services failed as well. He tried different formats for the phone number-in France, the leading zero in the ten-digit number should be included when calling inside the country but omitted when calling from abroad-to no effect. To ensure he had it right, he copied it from Contacts and pasted it into the form, but when he clicked Submit, the form failed verification. Have you ever had trouble pasting a phone number copied from Contacts into a Web form? It may not be a common problem, but it’s one that TidBITS reader Dave Fultz solved after a frustrating tussle with an online order form.ĭave was trying to order a package in France, and the form requested a mobile number at the delivery address.
0 kommentar(er)
