Blog - TextWhale

Base64 Decoding: How to Read Encoded Strings

The Mystery String You are looking at a URL, a cookie, or an API header, and you see a string of gibberish:...

Beyond the CSV When we think of "duplicates," we usually think of rows in a spreadsheet. But duplicates plague unstructured text...

The Tedium of Academic Citations Writing a thesis or a research paper is 50% research and 50% fighting with the bibliography. You download...

The "MsoNormal" Plague Microsoft Word is a print-layout tool. It cares about inches, page breaks, and paper size. WordPress is a web-layout...

The Tower of Babel: Naming Conventions In linguistics, we have different languages (English, Spanish, Japanese). In programming, we have...

The Struggle of the Technical Blogger You have written a brilliant Python script. You want to share it on your blog. You copy it from your IDE...

The Hidden Danger of "Paste" In the world of web development and database management, "Rich Text" is a double-edged sword. Users love it because...

The CSV Data Dump CSV (Comma Separated Values) is the lingua franca of data. Every app imports and exports CSV. But CSVs are often generated...

The Fluff Virus We are trained in school to write long essays. We are taught to hit a word count. So we learn to fluff. "In order to" (3...

The Networking Nightmare You attend a conference. You scan 50 business cards. You sync your LinkedIn contacts. You connect your Gmail address...

The "Phantom Formatting" Problem Web designers use a lot of tricks to make text look good. They use "soft hyphens" () to make words break...

The Manual Labor Trap Imagine you are a developer. You have a list of 200 country codes for a configuration file. `us, ca, gb, fr, de...` The...