December 24th, 2010
like1 reaction

That mysterious 01

Some time ago, we learned the story of that mysterious J. There is another mystery character that sometimes shows up in place of a smiley face: the \001. The character starts out as the Unicode U+263A, which looks like this: ☺. In code page 437, this character lives at position 1, and depending on what program is being used to display the character, it might appear as a box (representing the character U+0001) or as the escape sequence \001.

You can think of this as a version of the mysterious J, but taking a route through code page 437, or you can think of it as how a bullet turns into a beep taken in reverse, then reversed again.

Topics
Other

Author

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

0 comments

Discussion is closed.