Cool Unicode trick, via Mantari — cut and paste this character into a Unicode-aware application (like this post’s comment box!), then type something and see what happens:
‫‬â€â€®â€ªâ€«â€¬â€â€®Ò‰
Tags: unicode, via:mantari, witchcraft, woo
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The weblog of Justin Mason; incoherent ramblings about Apache SpamAssassin, anti-spam, perl, software development, and the web, from an Irish software developer.
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enda said,
August 27, 2007 @ 4:13 pm
My Evolution client sometimes does this when I get a mail from one particular person. I had figured out that some embedded character was doing the damage, but now at least I know it isn’t an application error.
What is the unicode character?
Justin said,
August 27, 2007 @ 4:35 pm
hey Enda, looks like it’s on Reddit now: http://www.tipotheday.com/2007/08/26/wtf-is-this-character/
it’s called ‘right to left override’, apparently, although the ‘circle of commas is the Unicode character U+0489 COMBINING CYRILLIC MILLIONS SIGN’, which apparently has combined with the character before it, hence you can’t cut and paste one without the other.
All very bizarre!
noNameRequired453183 said,
August 27, 2007 @ 9:03 pm
Cool. as a hebrew native speaker, i wonder if this has anything to do with “nikod”. in hebrew you can replace vowels (e.g. aeiuo) with little dots and lines above, below and inside the character (for example, when you put a dot inside the letter פ , it changes from f to p). almost nobody uses it (it’s mainly for litrature, religous texts and helping small children to learn how to read), most of the time people read without nikod and just know how to pronounce the words, but it’s still part of the protocol (backward compatibility and all that).
Jamie McCarthy said,
August 28, 2007 @ 3:41 am
Things like this are why Slash disallows all Unicode characters except for those specifically allowed…
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=259435&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20094775
vgfsdg said,
April 13, 2008 @ 3:11 pm
‫‬â€â€®â€ªâ€«â€¬â€â€®Ò‰ well ok then here is me testing