Last Updated: 2024-04-25

Quotes

Always check if strings fields can handle single and double quotes if they are being passed to another language (e.g. via JSON) to another system. In Project A, we generated charts of carbon data for various suppliers and only discovered in QA that the graphs all broke when a supplier name had a single quote in it. The fix was a system that properly escaped these entities.

Unicode

In another case, working with the channels library in Django, the presence of a German umlaut or Japanese characters in a username caused the system to break.

Conclusions

In general

• prefer simple ids (e.g. numerical primary keys over usernames) if possible
• have one or more test strings to quick rule out common issues when testing

test_str = "a'\"hello ü\n"

• check library docs for encoding info