U+FEFF at start of fields crash Chrome

[mikenolan]

Came across this earlier in the week on the same day as we found #30005. Also only happens in Twenty Twelve.

If a U+FEFF character appears at the start of the title of a post then viewing the post will crash Chrome (and Opera):

​https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-rPZ6460XuzTGVLTEcybEM1eUU/view?usp=sharing

It only happens if the character is at the start of the title and also happens with other fields such as excerpt on pages where that text is shown (e.g. search results pages)

Can also reproduce on WordPress.com (this will crash your browser tab in Chrome!!):

​http://mikenolan.wordpress.com/ufeff-bug/

One of our servers (running a different version of PHP but same version of WordPress and Twenty Twelve theme) replaces the U+FEFF character with a question mark and pages load fine.

[miqrogroove]

You should report your bug at ​https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list

Is there any reason to track this as a WordPress defect?

[mikenolan]

Replying to miqrogroove:

You should report your bug at ​https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list

Is there any reason to track this as a WordPress defect?

I submitted a bug report in Chrome yesterday as well.

While the crash may be caused by Chrome, maybe it's not a good idea for BOM characters to be allowed at the start of strings stored by WP?

​http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#bom6

[azaozz]

Tried to reproduce in Chrome 38.0.2125.101 m (Win7, 64). No crash when accessing the above URL. While testing, Chrome updated itself to 38.0.2125.104 m which also worked properly.

Looks like a bug that got fixed.

[wonderboymusic]

Marked close 11 months ago, bug appears to be fixed in Chrome as per comment:5