Hi Chris,
On 20 November 2018 03:39:02 GMT+05:30, Chris Koerner <
ckoerner(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Thanks for the informative did you know section. It was an interesting
read. :-)
* Letters are encoded internally by computers as
numbersâfor example,
âAâ is 65 and âaâ is 97.[3] Years ago, programs and even websites
would use different encodings[4] to represent text, often leading to
unreadable gibberish on screen. Unicode[5] was intended to be a single
encoding for most of the worldâs writing systems. The most-used parts
of it fit into a 16-bit representation,[6] which can handle about 65
thousand characters. But that's not enough for the very large number
of rare and historical Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) characters,
which are represented in 16-bit Unicode using âsurrogate pairsâ.[7]
1,024 Unicode characters are set aside to be âhigh surrogatesââthe
first half of a 32-bit characterâand 1,024 characters are set aside to
be âlow surrogatesââthe second half. By themselves, the surrogates
arenât valid and donât represent anything, but in pairs they can
represent over a million additional characters. Since these characters
are usually rare, software can sometimes treat them incorrectly split
them up, which can result in you seeing the Unicode replacement
character ïżœ,[8] which is used when something has gone wrong processing
Unicode text. (When the character is fine, but you donât have a font
to show it, you sometimes get little squares instead. Since the most
common source of these squares for English speakers is unrepresented
CJK characters, a slang term for the squares is âtofuâ.[9])
[0]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T168427
[1]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T209293
[2]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T209156
[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#Printable_characters
[4]
--
Sivaraam
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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