What is the ISO code for an ellipsis with FOUR dots?

Factual Questions
1

I’m using a small script to transform word documents into valid XHTML. This works fine for most things, catching curly quotes, en dashes, and so on… but there’s one character I can’t figure out how to handle.

I know that the ellipsis with three dots is 8230, so I can do something like this:



'ellipsis with three dots
call cleanTags(ChrW(8230), "...")
'but what do I do when there are four?
'call cleanTags(ChrW(???), "....")

So, even if there’s no ISO for that, does anybody know what code word uses? I’d take this to a VBA forum, but this really isn’t a question about VBA…

2

To the best of my knowledge, an ellipsis is three dots. What people think is a four dot version is an ellipsis at the end of a sentence followed by a period.

3

I agree. However, Bill Gates (as he so often does) has a different idea… there is a four-dot “ellipsis” character.

4

That’s weird. Any time I make a 4-dot ellipsis in Word 2000, I get …. (ellipsis period). Can you copy and paste a line in here that uses the four-dot ellipsis character?

You should at least be able to copy and paste it into Excel, and then use the CODE() function to figure it out. Put the odd character in cell A1, and then in another cell type =CODE(A1) and press enter. That cell should now contain the code you are looking for.

If it contains 8230, then you’ve actually got two characters, and you’ll have to adjust your code appropriately.

5

The Unicode Character ‘MONGOLIAN ELLIPSIS’ (U+1801) has four dots.

And I would bet a silk pyjama
There isn’t any three-L lllama

6

According to Wikipedia, it seems the Mongolian ellipsis is vertical, though.

This Unicode chart (warning: PDF) seems to agree.

7

There is a combining char (i.e. one intended to be used with another: COMBINING FOUR DOTS ABOVE = ⃜

8

Thanks, all. I’ll try the Excel code(a1) thing next time I see such an animal. I’ve yanked them out manually and can’t seem to get another one, but I’m sue it’ll come up again.