Invisible Character Mystery
Bull
From time to time a mysterious invisible character shows up in my
BBEdit text. It appears on the screen as just a space, but when I Show
Invisibles + Show Spaces, the diamond symbol is not there. I
highlighted the space and opened the ASCII Table, but no ASCII code
was indicated. I tried all sorts of different text codings but the
character remains invisible. When I Zap Gremlins it does indeed get
zapped. When I try to save a file that contains the character with
Western encoding I'm told the character is unmappable, and that I have
to save it as UTF-8.
The problem comes if I copy a string with the character in BBEdit and
paste it in Terminal (or almost anywhere else). If the character is in
the middle of a string, the two adjacent words are catenated into one.
If the character is at the end of a string, then when I paste that
string in Terminal it appears as a space but is treated as part of the
word it abuts.
I don't really care what this character is, but I would love to know
what I'm doing that creates it. I just spent an hour trying to debug a
perfectly good Perl script when I fed the script a string with the
mystery character at the end.
Thank y'all,
Wayne Durham
Blacksburg, Virginia
Rich Siegel
> From time to time a mysterious invisible character shows up in my
> BBEdit text. It appears on the screen as just a space, but when I Show
> Invisibles + Show Spaces, the diamond symbol is not there.
It's probably a nonbreaking space, which you get by typing Option-space.
R.
--
Rich Siegel Bare Bones Software, Inc.
<sie...@barebones.com> <http://www.barebones.com/>
Someday I'll look back on all this and laugh... until they sedate me.
Bull
Invisibles. This thing doesn't appear at all.
Bull
more strange things in Terminal than I thought. In the middle of a
string it appears on the screen to be removed and the surrounding
parts catenated, but when processed (by my perl cryptogram solver) it
is still there, and is treated as three distinct letters.
Steve Kalkwarf
> After fooling around with the mystery character a little more, it does
> more strange things in Terminal than I thought. In the middle of a
> string it appears on the screen to be removed and the surrounding
> parts catenated, but when processed (by my perl cryptogram solver) it
> is still there, and is treated as three distinct letters.
File->Hex Dump Front Document…
What are the bytes?
Steve
Bull
b b
(there's a mystery character before the first b, between the two bs,
and after the second b) gets Hex Dumped as
00 62 FE FF 00 62 FE FF 00 0D .b...b....
Bull
too. In other places I saw two mystery characters in a row show up as
FE FF FE FF 00.
Bull
Bull
pair of bytes while simply typing text in BBEdit?
François Schiettecatte
- your text encoding default is set to include BOM
- the encoding pulldown at the bottom left of the text window was set to include BOM (note that you can change the encoding of a document on the fly, pretty useful)
François
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Bull
On Oct 20, 7:55 pm, François Schiettecatte <fschietteca...@gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> - your text encoding default is set to include BOM
>
> - the encoding pulldown at the bottom left of the text window was set to include BOM (note that you can change the encoding of a document on the fly, pretty useful)
>
> François
>
> On Oct 20, 2011, at 7:19 PM, Bull wrote:
>
> > This thread has come down to this question: How did I generate a BOM
> > pair of bytes while simply typing text in BBEdit?
>
> > On Oct 20, 11:49 am, Bull <dur...@vt.edu> wrote:
> >> It's a BOM isn't it? Where did it come from?
>
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the
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> > To post to this group, send email to bbe...@googlegroups.com
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
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> > For more options, visit this group at
> > <http://groups.google.com/group/bbedit?hl=en>
> > If you have a feature request or would like to report a problem,
François Schiettecatte
F.
> please email "sup...@barebones.com" rather than posting to the group.
Doug McNutt
>Maybe it got copy-pasted in, or you duplicated the file from another one, at this point this is speculation.
>
It's possible that the behavior depends on the format in which the file is actually saved on disk. Most of use UTf-8 which would look like bytes of old.
But what if the OP has storage set to one of the UTF-16 options? Would things be different?
--
--> From the U S of A, the only socialist country that refuses to admit it. <--
Bull
saved to disk, as the text originated in the Scratchpad.
Maybe the mystery character comes from something about the
Scratchpad's ambiguous nature: looks like a file, acts like a file,
but is not a file.
Does the Scratchpad have some snippet of code that generates a BOM
under some circumstances?