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I'm referring to this edit: I understand that voilà is only 5 characters long. Or does à count as two characters? Or do removed characters count towards the limit?

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This is just my perspective on it; I don't know exactly how the SE code calculates the changes (apart from having just learned that the differences are calculated after applying Markdown).

According to the Meta SE post How do suggested edits work?, in the section Is there a minimum change threshold for a suggested edit?:

all suggested edits that modify the body in any way must change at least six characters in the post body. Each character added or removed counts as one towards this check.

Apparently SE calculated the removal of "wallah" as six characters, despite one of the l's as being unchanged if you overlaid the texts.

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  • To go from wallah to voila, you need to change all characters: w->v, a->o, l->i, l->a, h to a space and remove the space that was after the old h. So that's 6 changes in total. I think that's how they count it.
    – terdon Mod
    Aug 27, 2019 at 16:31
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    you missed the l in voila?
    – Jeff Schaller Mod
    Aug 27, 2019 at 16:33
  • Argh, so I did. Never mind. I do think the space makes the difference though.
    – terdon Mod
    Aug 27, 2019 at 16:39
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    I remember when I was under 2K rep I was doing edit for less than six characters and to by pass that error I was entering a few empty lines with Enter key and SE later was deleting the empty lines so edit could made with no error then
    – αғsнιη
    Sep 2, 2019 at 2:51

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