Would Someone Please Explain What This Symbol Means

[shh1313]

if I ever figure out code y’all going to be in trouble. Imagine if the code you wrote spoke, or sang…

[BigT]

@DPRK

Unicode encodes many characters, including the banjo , the ninja , and various cuneiform ligatures 𒅬, but, thankfully, no Klingon, which shows that a modicum of sanity still reigns.

The rationale is that Klingon is most commonly written in Roman letters. If it wasn’t, apparently they would have added it due to the sheer number of people who communicate in Klingon.

[John_DiFool]

Thanks Doc, figgered it was pop cultural and not political at least.

[Max_S]

@Dr.Strangelove

However, I am extremely confident that we are seeing a right single quotation mark (generally used as a “curly apostrophe”), encoded as UTF-8, but displayed as ASCII with some extended code page. It would be one where the hex bytes 0xe2 0x80 and 0x99 render as ’. It would be too coincidental for it to be anything else.

I have occasionally noticed websites that display these characters until I enable javascript. I suspect they use scripts to set the language or encoding for content. If the script breaks, the quotation marks ‘’ (U+2018, U+2019) don’t render properly.

~Max

[DPRK]

I created a computer file with a single character: ⏦
No Javascript or HTML or other metadata. Then I opened it in Firefox, and (unsurprisingly) it displayed the contents correctly.

[DPRK]

@shh1313

if I ever figure out code y’all going to be in trouble. Imagine if the code you wrote spoke, or sang…

Computer code can sing and dance. Here you go:

HYDRA

http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/

Sonic Pi - The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone

[ZipperJJ]

I just want to drop into this discussion and point out that a lot of these mis-codings come from copy-and-paste going from one source to another. So you’ve got your product descriptions or blog posts all typed out in Word or Excel and you go to your Content Management System (CMS) for your web site and paste them all in, or import them, and the curly quotes or what have you get mucked along the way and then get published to your site as garbage between letters.

I post a lot of text for my clients to their sites that they’ve sent to me in a Word doc or Excel sheet and I have to keep an eye out for those special chars and replace them with plain text or html code to make sure the site looks good.

Another point is that when you paste stuff from Word into a WYSIWYG editor (a field on a CMS that takes your text and turns it into HTML in real time) you get a TON of extra Microsoft HTML in there. A ton. It’s gnarly. Users who post this way aren’t looking at the resulting HTML so they have no idea and don’t care that it’s there. It’s not a problem until it’s a problem.

[DPRK]

Some media attention re Unicode shenanigans:

Face palm: When the emoji you want doesn't exist

Why are any emoji in there at all? As the article reminds us,

Fast-forward to the late 2000s when tech giants Apple and Google wanted to enter the Japanese market with products such as Gmail and the iPhone. Billionaire technology entrepreneur Masayoshi Son advised the Californian firms that if they wanted to succeed in Japan, they should offer emojis - because the “picture-characters” or “e-moji” were already a hit with users.

Basically, $$$, as if there were not enough garbage already encoded in the character set.