The specific “!@#&” sequence appears exactly where I would expect newlines to appear where the ‘files’ within the tree correspond to Lua source, so I think that’s a crude substitution encoding of newline; perhaps someone chose it because they thought it would be uncommon (or due to frustration over syntax errors) while writing the “encode as string literal” logic.
Yeah, that makes sense. I was unsure about the opcode guess because if it was a Lua VIM/JIT opcode from bytecompiling (which often results in lots of strings interspersed with binary gibberish), why would it be so rare? As I understand Lao Mein, this is supposed to be some of the only occurrences online; Lua is an unpopular language compared to something like Python or JS, sure, but there’s still a lot of it out there and all of the opcodes as well as their various manglings or string-encodings ought to show up reasonably often. But if it’s some very ad hoc encoding—especially if it’s an Minecraft kid, who doesn’t know any better—then choosing cartoon-style expletives as a unique encoding of annoying characters like \n would be entirely in keeping with the juvenile humor elsewhere in that fragment.
And the repeated “linox”/”Linux” typo might be another nasty quick ad hoc hack to work around something like a ‘Linux’ setting already existing but not wanting to figure out how to properly override or customize or integrate with it.
Yeah, that makes sense. I was unsure about the opcode guess because if it was a Lua VIM/JIT opcode from bytecompiling (which often results in lots of strings interspersed with binary gibberish), why would it be so rare? As I understand Lao Mein, this is supposed to be some of the only occurrences online; Lua is an unpopular language compared to something like Python or JS, sure, but there’s still a lot of it out there and all of the opcodes as well as their various manglings or string-encodings ought to show up reasonably often. But if it’s some very ad hoc encoding—especially if it’s an Minecraft kid, who doesn’t know any better—then choosing cartoon-style expletives as a unique encoding of annoying characters like
\n
would be entirely in keeping with the juvenile humor elsewhere in that fragment.And the repeated “linox”/”Linux” typo might be another nasty quick ad hoc hack to work around something like a ‘Linux’ setting already existing but not wanting to figure out how to properly override or customize or integrate with it.