Underlining text posted to slack - webhooks

I am trying to see if there is a way to underline a text posted to slack. I am using webhook for posting messages to slack.

You can approximate it with Unicode’s COMBINING LOW LINE character: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0332/index.htm . Before posting, split your string along grapheme boundaries and insert a COMBINING LOW LINE after each. This sort of works, but with Slack’s default font the underline sometimes splits visually between characters. It’s enough though to give an impression, which might be what you want if, for example, you’re trying to give an example of the position of a link within a piece of text.

I don't think this can be done. See https://api.slack.com/docs/formatting for the available message formatting options.

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Unicode character order problem when text is displayed

I am working on an application that converts text into some other characters of the extended ASCII character set that gets displayed in custom font.
The program operation essentially parses the input string using regex, locates the standard characters and outputs them as converted before returning a string with the modified text which displays correctly when viewed with the correct font.
Every now and again, the function returns a string where the characters are displayed in the wrong order, almost like they are corrupted or some data is missing from the Unicode double width spacing. I have examined the binary output, the hex data, and inspected the data in the function before i return it and everything looks ok, but every once in a while something goes wrong and cant quite put my finger on it.
To see an example of what i mean when i say the order is weird, just take a look at the following piece of converted text output from the program and try to highlight it with your mouse. You will see that it doesn't highlight in the order you expect despite how it appears.
Has anyone seen anything like this before and have they any ideas as to what is going on?
ך┼♫יἯ╡П♪דἰ
You are mixing various Unicode characters with different LTR/RTL characteristics.
LTR means "left-to-right" and is the direction that English (and many other western language) text is written.
RTL is "right-to-left" and is used mostly by Arabic and Hebrew (as well as several other scripts).
By default when rendering Unicode text the engine will try to use the directionality of the characters to figure out what direction a given part of the code should go. And normally that works just fine because Hebrew words will have only Hebrew letters and English words will only use letters from the Latin alphabet, so for each chunk there's a easily guessable direction that makes sense.
But you are mixing letters from different scripts and with different directionality.
For example ך is U+05DA HEBREW LETTER FINAL KAF, but you also use two other Hebrew characters. You can use something like this page to list the Unicode characters you used.
You can either
not use "wrong" directionality letters or
make the direction explict using a Left-to-right mark character.
Edit: Last but not least: I just realized that you said "custom font": if you expect displaying with a specific custom font, then you should really be using one of the private use areas in Unicode: they are explicitly reserved for private use like this (i.e. where the characters don't match the publicly defined glyphs for the codepoints). That would also avoid surprises like the ones you get, where some of the used characters have different rendering properties.

Creating a 4-5 character column along the left margin in vim

As a bit of context, I am considering making a plugin for vim that would inline specific debugging and/or profiling information on along the left margin (ideally left of the numbers column) which would need to be 4-5 characters wide. However, I cannot find any means to accomplish this. I've searched around, and the closest thing I can find is vimscript code for inserting signs in the sign column, but the sign column is fixed at 2 characters wide.
I've considered the possibility of making my own makeshift column (to the right of the numbers column, in the normally editable text area) and somehow marking it as readonly, but that doesn't seem possible either- from what I've read, the entire buffer must be readonly or not; you can't have just a portion as readonly.
For completeness here's an example. I would like to programmatically insert a 4-5 character column before some text (with numbers set)
1 Text buffer
2 with some
3 text
to make
My 1 Text buffer
own 2 with some
text 3 text
Is there any way to accomplish this task?
The built-in feature for this is the sign column, but yes it is limited to two characters.
Depending on your use cases, it might be okay to enhance the signs with a tooltip popup (:help balloon-eval explicitly mentions This feature allows a debugger, or other external tool, to display dynamic information based on where the mouse is pointing.), or maybe place the additional information in the quickfix or location list.
Modification of the actual buffer has many downsides (as it effectively prevents editing, and Vim's main purpose is just that). What some plugins do is showing a scratch (that is: unpersisted, unmodifiable) buffer in a vertical split, and setting the 'scrollbind' option so that its contents follow the original buffer. For an example, have a look at the VCSCommand plugin, which uses this for annotating a buffer with commit information.

Azure Search result highlight snippets

I am using the Hit Highlighting feature in Azure Search and noticed a discrepancy in the way it behaves from the documentation. In the documentation it says that when you use hit highlighting it will return a snippet of the field with the highlight, but it always returns the entire field (with proper highlighting).
Is there a way to have Azure Search instead return just a snippet (say of about 200 characters) that includes the highlight?
Currently, the answer is no, you cannot. The field breaks according to (English) sentence rules, ie. it breaks on ".", "!", "?".
Also see this question for an example on breaking and some more info relating to the delimiters.
Depending on the nature of the field you might be able to add one of the above delimiters to 'emulate' what you want to accomplish (as suggested by Nate Ko).
I want to suggest something else on top of what Nate spoke to. When you look at the document response, also take a look at the Highlights part of the results (as opposed to the Document). For example, you might be currently getting the field results by retrieving something like this:
Results[i].Document.DESCRIPTION
If there is a highlight found for that field, the snipped will be found here:
Results[i].Highlights.DESCRIPTION
What I like to do is to first check if there is a valid Highlight and if so display it. If not, I show the actual field content.
Liam
We recently introduced a change that improves the highlighter performance on large fields and NLP experience. One side effect of the change was that the new highlighter generates snippets based on sentences, breaking the text field on '.' (period).
One way to workaround the issue is to put '.'s in the field. We are working to enforce the snippet size and let you know when it is available.

What kind of sign is "‎" and what is it used for

What kind of sign is "‎" and what is it used for (note there is a invisible sign there)?
I have searched through all my documents and found a lot of them. They messed upp my htaccess file. I think I got them when I copied webadresses from google to redirect. So maybe a warning searching through your documents for this one also :)
It is U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK. (A quick way to check out such things is to copy a string containing the character and paste it in the writing area in my Full Unicode input utility, then click on the “Show U+” button there, and use Fileformat.Info character search to check out the name and other properties of the character, on the basis of its U+... number.)
The LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK sets the writing direction of directionally neutral characters. It does not affect e.g. English or Arabic words, but it may mess up text that contains parentheses for example – though for text in English, there should be no confusion in this sense.
But, of course, when text is processed programmatically, as when a web server processes a .htaccess file, they are character data and make a big difference.

Vim - Emphasis words or lines permanently

Is there a possibility to emphasis text passages, words s or single lines in a file permanently?
I'm thinking of something similar to the function in Word where you can emphasis your text selection by changing the background colour.
This would be helpful since I sometimes have code or text that I want to review later. Having a annotation command could come in quite handy.
Regards
This vim plugin does exactly what you want! The screenshots seem encouraging enough to try it out.

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