Length is not correctly tracked

[bnb]

What happened?

twitter-together failed on a tweet that should have worked, specifically due to line length.

What did you expect to happen?

twitter-together should have succeeded.

What the problem might be

I am fairly confident that this has to do with Twitter's link parsing. Testing out https://github.com/nodejs/build as an example, the .length of that as a string is 31 but Twitter only counts it as 23 chars (note that the space before the link is taking up one char):

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww https://github.com/nodejs/build

Given that all characters (ws and the sapce) here count as 280 characters, the actual count is 314 but the Twitter count is 303.

This occurs because under the hood, Twitter creates a t.co short link for every link that is - in total - 23 characters. It doesn't count additional characters in a URL toward the total character count, since they're only storing 23 in total. This will happen for each link, including photos.

[bnb]

Here is a specific Action run where this failed despite having a valid tweet length:

https://github.com/nodejs/tweet/pull/26/checks?check_run_id=2347151803

Screenshot from Twitter:

This might also indicate something about how the Action is counting emoji vs. how Twitter is counting emoji.

[gr2m]

We use https://github.com/twitter/twitter-text, it's most likely a problem with that library.

I'm not sure when I'll find the time to look into this I'm afraid, if anyone could investigate and send a PR, I'd be happy to review

[hlwjia]

@gr2m @bnb

From what I just tested with twitter-text, it appears that twitter-text (at least the @3.1.0) is working properly.

Here is my test:

let maxLengthTextForOneLink = 'w'.repeat(280 - 23 - 1)

280 is the max length
23 is the fixed length of shortened URL
1 is the space separating the URL from tweet content (text)

let oneSuperLongLink = 'https://github.com/this-is-obviously-longer-than-23'

A link that's obviously longer than 23 chars

console.log(parseTweet(oneSuperLongLink))

{
  weightedLength: 23,
  valid: true,
  permillage: 82,
  validRangeStart: 0,
  validRangeEnd: 50,
  displayRangeStart: 0,
  displayRangeEnd: 50
}

the weighted length is, as expected, 23

console.log(parseTweet(maxLengthTextForOneLink + ' ' + oneSuperLongLink))

{
  weightedLength: 280,
  valid: true,
  permillage: 1000,
  validRangeStart: 0,
  validRangeEnd: 307,
  displayRangeStart: 0,
  displayRangeEnd: 307
}

The valid property is true

---

conclusion:

It's probably not the twitter-text library.

[gr2m]

Thank you for testing John!

[hlwjia]

Upon a bit more digging, I think it has something to do with the whole newline at end of file issue.

I notice it from this PR https://github.com/nodejs/tweet/pull/26/files:

Somehow, this "No newline at end of file" hint has been included in the preview:

Which I'm highly confident that the added extra length to the original file is the cause of parseTweet(text).valid = false

---

Here is another PR whose tweet file has newline at end of file:

https://github.com/nodejs/tweet/pull/57/files

and its preview looks good.

A quick fix for @bnb would be to include newline at end of tweet files then.

Reference: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/729692/why-should-text-files-end-with-a-newline

---

Interestingly, even though the newline thingy is included in the preview checks, I don't think it ever gets tweeted out as part of the sent tweet.

@gr2m I see you use the the same parseTweetFileContent for both pull request and push, not sure why the different behavior.

I think maybe, just maybe, somewhere around here:
https://github.com/gr2m/twitter-together/blob/4fabe65750bfc7eda4b15b5fe9d9e5f52652b572/lib/pull-request/get-new-tweets.js#L47

---

Btw, great work on this project @gr2m! I had the same thought of making something like twitter-together, and found you've already done an amazing job!

[IstoraMandiri]

I believe this should be fixed in the next release.

Here's a test preview running the fix using the tweet at the top of this issue. It's validating as expected now. https://github.com/IstoraMandiri/twitter-together-testing/runs/8690276799

[MattIPv4]

This fix should be contained within 2.1.3 that has been shipped :)

[IstoraMandiri]

It should be, but it's not automatically building yet (#205), so using the 2.1.3 release still uses the 2.1.1 dist.

https://github.com/IstoraMandiri/twitter-together-testing/actions/runs/3178717079/jobs/5180494130#step:3:1

[MattIPv4]

Ah yep, forgot the release doesn't build :(