I got stuck with something and was looking to see if anybody could help me understand where I'm at.. It has to do with Unicode and ascii representations of a special control character..

I was helping another guy in a different forum and got him results, but dont know how I can make it predictably repeatable or where I got lost.

Here it is.. The device control character is a unicode character created by Alt+19 on the tenkey pad.. it makes a double not (2 exclamations as one character) Although, I need to save this in an ascii text file (bonk).. The ascii code is 0x013 or something like that, but cant figure out how to type that into notepad??

I ended up acheiving what I was after by using an html tag of "& # 1 9 ;" (spaces added as forum was rendering the character) then rendering it with IE and using copy and paste into notepad!! This gives me this in a simple ascii text file:



But what am i actually copying and pasting then???

Although, it doesnt render in some IE's...???? I think this is a FONT thing? (I dont know if it's actually showing in this forum yet)

I guess my question is, if anybody knows how to keyboard those types of characters into an ascii file? I couldnt figure out how to find it with Charmap to be able to find a font that contained it?

Is there a utility that will create this character from an ascii code?

Any input is appreciated....

Burr

Hi Burr, yeah not every font has every single unicode character glyph inside of it, so that's pretty normal that you might not see it rendered in IE unless you get it to use a font where you know that character exists.

There is a system utility program called "Character Map" which I think may help you out - it lets you examine all the characters that are contained within a particular font.

Go to Start > Run and put in charmap.exe to launch it.

In the "Search for" box there you can enter in a number for the unicode character you want and see if the font has it or not.


I don't think that ascii actually has a printable character for that - you can see all the ascii characters here:
http://www.asciitable.com/

So that's probably a unicode character that you're talking about and not an ascii character at all.


> I guess my question is, if anybody knows how to keyboard
> those types of characters into an ascii file?

You probably want to use a hex editor if you want to edit a file by entering in raw number values instead of a text editor.

If you have visual studio, go the the Open button when you open a file and click on the little down arrow on the right-hand side of it and choose "Open with" and choose "Binary Editor" instead of opening it as text. That will let you edit raw number values of a file instead of working with it as regular text.

Otherwise if you don't have Visual Studio, try searching for "hex editor" to find a file editor that will work like that, that's what they're normally called.

- Michael

Yeah, I used charmap, and it doesnt find anything.

So your forum here renders that character into the post.. Then if I select and copy it from the forum, I can insert that into Notepad.. Am I clipboarding that binary value??

I'll try a binary hex edit then.. Thanks for the info!!!!

> Then if I select and copy it from the forum, I can
> insert that into Notepad.. Am I clipboarding that
> binary value??

Yup, well you're actually clipboarding unicode text - that's CF_UNICODETEXT format:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms649013%28VS.85%29.aspx

When you paste that into notepad, you now have text that is not really representable in ascii anymore since you now have a character in your text that does not match to the limited set of ascii characters that you can see in that table I linked to before.

If you decide to save out to an ascii file from notepad, I guess it could write out the numeric value for that character anyway, but it looks like that is actually reserved in ascii for a message to control hardware devices and isn't supposed to be a printable character in ascii.

If you want to edit a file where you are controlling the raw number values of every byte in the file, you usually want to use a hex file editor to that kind of job rather than a text file editor though. A regular ascii text file editor would probably not let you make that character since it does not correspond to a printable character in the ascii table.

- Michael

Thanks for the time Michael... :)