ctzsm's blog

Some interesting discoveries while playing with Codeforces API.
By ctzsm, 10 years ago, In English

I am doing some analysis so the first step is to collect some real data. Since Codeforces has a great collection of APIs, I think is it a good idea to play with it.

Here are two fun facts I found today, if I find more, I will update this post.

There are 16 users have handle start with dot(.).

Why do I mention this? Because I use users' handles as file name while doing the analysis, their handles are hidden files in Unix/Linux system, which leads the result of ls -l | wc -l can not match the number of users.

There are 9 users have more than one consecutive dot(.) in their handles,

If you click on their handles, Codeforces will show you a 403 page, those poor guys can not see their own profile page! here is a trick to get their profile, just insert %20 between every dot in URL (Thanks to Igorjan94 and Maxim's comment). But believe me, they are exist, for example, meee... and Ad... are from Peru, you can find them here. With Codeforces API, you can not get their information by handle, but can not get others such as rating and status as it was mentioned in this comment.

If you want to register a handle like this, Codeforces system will complain with Field should contain only Latin letters, digits, underscore or dash characters.

But they do exist, I guess they may register such handles before Codeforces introduced this rule or maybe there is a bug. Anyway, this is interesting.

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10 years ago, # |
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"hack" with dots

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9 years ago, # |
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There is bug in current changing handle option where you can add ... to your name. You will not get "Field should contain only Latin letters, digits, underscore or dash characters".

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