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[roseway]

This is just a bit of curiosity on my part. On two different forums today (not this one) I've seen postings by people in which a few of the characters have been displayed as symbols looking like little square dominos with 4 hex characters instead of spots. What are these?

[Floydoid]

I dunno... maybe they are trying to be smart and using some kind of dingbats font.

[mr_chris]

Could you post up a screenshot perhaps, eric? Might help to identify the mystery characters!

[roseway]

Here's an example - look in the first Code section near the top. The word 'vga' is enclosed in these characters.

http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=7109

[roseway]

And here's a screenshot:

 

[mr_chris]

Interesting - those are ASCII characters 0x1C and 0x1D - odd!

What I reckon is that the characters were originally displayed in the console as unicode encoding or something, and then somewhere in the copy/paste to the forum, they've been 'converted' back to single-byte characters, and obviously the non-standard ones have been lost!

Actually, on investigating further, I think I know what it is, and my first thought was right . If you go into character map in Windows, and look at the Unicode punctuation characters (just to narrow it down a bit) - you can see the "shaped" quotation marks are double-byte encoded characters U+201C and U+201D (see attached screenshot) - corresponding to the dodgy characters in the posts, just without the high-order byte!

Problem explained, if not solved!

*edit* Your Linux charset displays the hex equivalent of a non-ASCII character... I had to find out what they were the hard way

[attachment deleted by admin]

[roseway]

A good bit of investigation Chris, despite your rudeness about my character set. It seems that this excellent OS of mine tries to be extra helpful when an unprintable character is displayed.

We've got a character selector too, by the way 8)



[attachment deleted by admin]

[Floydoid]

I see the offending characters as pi and not equals.

[guest]

I don't see them at all - don't you just love DBCS

[mr_chris]

A good bit of investigation Chris, despite your rudeness about my character set.

Lol - actually I wasn't meaning to be rude when I posted that, it just came out wrong - I was thinking how good it was that it displayed the character code!! But it didn't come across like that, sorry 

[guest]

Yes I agree - much nicer to see the real code than have the s/w randomly decide (well not quite but ) what to display/not display

[roseway]

Lol - actually I wasn't meaning to be rude when I posted that, it just came out wrong

Oh please, I wasn't offended, I was joking. Perhaps what I said came out wrong.

[roseway]

I don't see them at all - don't you just love DBCS

I had to think about 'DBCS' so I Googled for it, and this was one of the hits on the first page


[attachment deleted by admin]

[roseway]

I see the offending characters as pi and not equals.

Wouldn't standardisation be nice!

[mr_chris]

rofl as if to prove a point, eh?

And this text-based communication, no matter how good we are at it, sometimes does mean we don't always successfully get across the manner in which we're trying to say something. I did have a feeling you were joking.

Perhaps I should have replied in Unicode, then everyone would have read my post differently