Ruby: Weird JSON.encode Problem

Check this out:

>> ActiveSupport::JSON.decode("[1]")
=> [1]
>> ActiveSupport::JSON.decode("[1]")
=> "[1]"

Weird, right? I'm calling the same thing twice and getting a different answer each time. The second answer is clearly wrong. I should get an Array, not a String.

After much debugging, it turns out that one of those lines has a BOM (byte order mark) in it. BOMs are completely invisible. I copied it from a file that was giving me a hard time. Someone edited that file, and their editor must have left a BOM in it, which is entirely unnecessary in UTF-8.

It turns out that ActiveSupport::JSON.decode acts nonsensically if you give it a BOM. I would expect it to either ignore the BOM or crash with an exception. Instead, it gave me a nonsensical response.

Here's the bug for this issue.

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Drawing Sierpinski's Triangle in Minecraft Using Python

In his keynote at PyCon, Eben Upton, the Executive Director of the Rasberry Pi Foundation, mentioned that not only has Minecraft been ported to the Rasberry Pi, but you can even control it with Python. Since four of my kids are avid Minecraft fans, I figured this might be a good time to teach them to program using Python. So I started yesterday with the goal of programming something cool for Minecraft and then showing it off at the San Francisco Python Meetup in the evening.

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