Website: Request to avoid look similar characters in the generation of a URL for a route

Discussion Implemented features
1

there are many of us who’s eyesight is pretty good but not what it used to be.

Is there any way to request that the generated URL shortcut for a route
avoid the “look similar” characters of:
l1IO0ijo

The above request would aide readability, avoid much confusion, while still leaving a vast universe of character permutations to draw from.

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2

Thanks for the proposal, that is indeed something I wanted to have a look at as well.

I think we could avoid to use “I” (i) and “l” (L) and also 0 and O.

I am not sure if we should also do this for “i” and “j” or “g” and “q”?

3

Such a small thing but so much impact! What a great suggestion

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4

My experience with some devices and fonts I am forced to use is…

  • lowercase “l” / number “1” / Capital “I” all can be confused with each other
  • upcase “O” / number “0” / lowercase “o” all can be confused with each other
  • lower “i” and lowercase “j” are “skinny” and have a dot, if font is small thats all the eyes see.

Boldtrn suggested lowercase “g” and lowercase “q”
I have not seen this to be an issue but if others have this issue
then yes, include these in the radioactive character set.

Assuming all ten of the above characters are made radioactive
that still leaves 52 other characters legal.

abcdef h k mn p rstuvwxyz
ABCDEFGH JKLMN PQRSTUVWXYZ
23456789

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5

Thanks for the nice idea. I updated the kurv.gr service to not use:

  • I1l
  • O0o
  • ij

If there is anything other character that we should change, please let me know. This doesn’t change exiting urls.

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6

I had reason to generate 4 URL’s today.
All four were devoid of the look similar characters.

The above limited test appears to confirm success of the code change.
Thanks again.

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