Specials (Unicode block) - Wikipedia Specials (Unicode block) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigation Jump to search Unicode block containing some special codepoints and two non-characters This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Specials" Unicode block – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2010) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unicode character block Specials Range U+FFF0..U+FFFF (16 code points) Plane BMP Scripts Common Assigned 5 code points Unused 9 reserved code points 2 non-characters Unicode version history 1.0.0 1 (+1) 2.1 2 (+1) 3.0 5 (+3) Note: [1][2] Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 code points, five have been assigned since Unicode 3.0: U+FFF9 INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION ANCHOR, marks start of annotated text U+FFFA INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION SEPARATOR, marks start of annotating character(s) U+FFFB INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION TERMINATOR, marks end of annotation block U+FFFC  OBJECT REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, placeholder in the text for another unspecified object, for example in a compound document. U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE not a character. U+FFFF not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the usual sense, but guaranteed not to be Unicode characters at all. They can be used to guess a text's encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by definition not a correctly encoded Unicode text. Unicode's U+FEFF BYTE ORDER MARK character can be inserted at the beginning of a Unicode text to signal its endianness: a program reading such a text and encountering 0xFFFE would then know that it should switch the byte order for all the following characters. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Special.[3] Contents 1 Replacement character 2 Unicode chart 3 History 4 See also 5 References Replacement character[edit] Replacement character The replacement character � (often a black diamond with a white question mark or an empty square box) is a symbol found in the Unicode standard at code point U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol. It is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character: Consider a text file containing the German word für (meaning 'for') in the ISO-8859-1 encoding (0x66 0xFC 0x72). This file is now opened with a text editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, but the middle byte (0xFC) is not a valid byte in UTF-8. Therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this: "f�r". A poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form; the text file data will then look like this: 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as "f�r" (this is called mojibake). Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character. A better (but harder to implement) design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence, while still showing the error indicator to the user. At one time the replacement character was often used when there was no glyph available in a font for that character. However most modern text rendering systems instead use a font's .notdef character, which in most cases is an empty box (or "?" in a box[4]), sometimes called a "tofu" (this browser displays 􏿾). There is no Unicode code point for this symbol. Thus the replacement character is now only seen for encoding errors, such as invalid UTF-8. Some software attempts to hide this by translating the bytes of invalid UTF-8 to matching characters in Windows-1252 (since that is the most likely source of these errors), so that the replacement character is never seen. Unicode chart[edit] Specials[1][2][3] Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)   0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F U+FFFx  IA  A  IA  S  IA  T  � Notes 1.^ As of Unicode version 13.0 2.^ Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points 3.^ Black areas indicate noncharacters (code points that are guaranteed never to be assigned as encoded characters in the Unicode Standard) History[edit] The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Specials block: Version Final code points[a] Count UTC ID L2 ID WG2 ID Document 1.0.0 U+FFFD 1 (to be determined) U+FFFE..FFFF 2 (to be determined) L2/01-295R Moore, Lisa (2001-11-06), "Motion 88-M2", Minutes from the UTC/L2 meeting #88 L2/01-355 N2369 (html, doc) Davis, Mark (2001-09-26), Request to allow FFFF, FFFE in UTF-8 in the text of ISO/IEC 10646 L2/02-154 N2403 Umamaheswaran, V. S. (2002-04-22), "9.3 Allowing FFFF and FFFE in UTF-8", Draft minutes of WG 2 meeting 41, Hotel Phoenix, Singapore, 2001-10-15/19 2.1 U+FFFC 1 UTC/1995-056 Sargent, Murray (1995-12-06), Recommendation to encode a WCH_EMBEDDING character UTC/1996-002 Aliprand, Joan; Hart, Edwin; Greenfield, Steve (1996-03-05), "Embedded Objects", UTC #67 Minutes N1365 Sargent, Murray (1996-03-18), Proposal Summary – Object Replacement Character N1353 Umamaheswaran, V. S.; Ksar, Mike (1996-06-25), "8.14", Draft minutes of WG2 Copenhagen Meeting # 30 L2/97-288 N1603 Umamaheswaran, V. S. (1997-10-24), "7.3", Unconfirmed Meeting Minutes, WG 2 Meeting # 33, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, 20 June – 4 July 1997 L2/98-004R N1681 Text of ISO 10646 – AMD 18 for PDAM registration and FPDAM ballot, 1997-12-22 L2/98-070 Aliprand, Joan; Winkler, Arnold, "Additional comments regarding 2.1", Minutes of the joint UTC and L2 meeting from the meeting in Cupertino, February 25-27, 1998 L2/98-318 N1894 Revised text of 10646-1/FPDAM 18, AMENDMENT 18: Symbols and Others, 1998-10-22 3.0 U+FFF9..FFFB 3 L2/97-255R Aliprand, Joan (1997-12-03), "3.D Proposal for In-Line Notation (ruby)", Approved Minutes – UTC #73 & L2 #170 joint meeting, Palo Alto, CA – August 4-5, 1997 L2/98-055 Freytag, Asmus (1998-02-22), Support for Implementing Inline and Interlinear Annotations L2/98-070 Aliprand, Joan; Winkler, Arnold, "3.C.5. Support for implementing inline and interlinear annotations", Minutes of the joint UTC and L2 meeting from the meeting in Cupertino, February 25-27, 1998 L2/98-099 N1727 Freytag, Asmus (1998-03-18), Support for Implementing Interlinear Annotations as used in East Asian Typography L2/98-158 Aliprand, Joan; Winkler, Arnold (1998-05-26), "Inline and Interlinear Annotations", Draft Minutes – UTC #76 & NCITS Subgroup L2 #173 joint meeting, Tredyffrin, Pennsylvania, April 20-22, 1998 L2/98-286 N1703 Umamaheswaran, V. S.; Ksar, Mike (1998-07-02), "8.14", Unconfirmed Meeting Minutes, WG 2 Meeting #34, Redmond, WA, USA; 1998-03-16--20 L2/98-270 Hiura, Hideki; Kobayashi, Tatsuo (1998-07-29), Suggestion to the inline and interlinear annotation proposal L2/98-281R (pdf, html) Aliprand, Joan (1998-07-31), "In-Line and Interlinear Annotation (III.C.1.c)", Unconfirmed Minutes – UTC #77 & NCITS Subgroup L2 # 174 JOINT MEETING, Redmond, WA -- July 29-31, 1998 L2/98-363 N1861 Sato, T. K. (1998-09-01), Ruby markers L2/98-372 N1884R2 (pdf, doc) Whistler, Ken; et al. (1998-09-22), Additional Characters for the UCS L2/98-416 N1882.zip Support for Implementing Interlinear Annotations, 1998-09-23 L2/98-329 N1920 Combined PDAM registration and consideration ballot on WD for ISO/IEC 10646-1/Amd. 30, AMENDMENT 30: Additional Latin and other characters, 1998-10-28 L2/98-421R Suignard, Michel; Hiura, Hideki (1998-12-04), Notes concerning the PDAM 30 interlinear annotation characters L2/99-010 N1903 (pdf, html, doc) Umamaheswaran, V. S. (1998-12-30), "8.2.15", Minutes of WG 2 meeting 35, London, U.K.; 1998-09-21--25 L2/98-419 (pdf, doc) Aliprand, Joan (1999-02-05), "Interlinear Annotation Characters", Approved Minutes -- UTC #78 & NCITS Subgroup L2 # 175 Joint Meeting, San Jose, CA -- December 1-4, 1998 UTC/1999-021 Duerst, Martin; Bosak, Jon (1999-06-08), W3C XML CG statement on annotation characters L2/99-176R Moore, Lisa (1999-11-04), "W3C Liaison Statement on Annotation Characters", Minutes from the joint UTC/L2 meeting in Seattle, June 8-10, 1999 L2/01-301 Whistler, Ken (2001-08-01), "E. Indicated as "strongly discouraged" for plain text interchange", Analysis of Character Deprecation in the Unicode Standard ^ Proposed code points and characters names may differ from final code points and names See also[edit] Unicode control characters References[edit] ^ "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2016-07-09. ^ "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2016-07-09. ^ "3.8: Block-by-Block Charts" (PDF). The Unicode Standard. version 1.0. Unicode Consortium. ^ "Recommendations for OpenType Fonts (OpenType 1.7) - Typography". docs.microsoft.com. Retrieved 18 October 2020. v t e Unicode Unicode Unicode Consortium ISO/IEC 10646 (Universal Character Set) Versions Code points Blocks Universal Character Set Character charts Character property Planes Private Use Areas Characters Special purpose BOM Combining Grapheme Joiner Left-to-right mark / Right-to-left mark Soft hyphen Word joiner Zero-width joiner Zero-width non-joiner Zero-width space Lists Characters CJK Unified Ideographs Combining character Duplicate characters Numerals Scripts Spaces Symbols Halfwidth and fullwidth Alias names and abbreviations Processing Algorithms Bidirectional text Collation ISO 14651 Equivalence Variation sequences International Ideographs Core Comparison BOCU-1 CESU-8 Punycode SCSU UTF-1 UTF-7 UTF-8 UTF-16/UCS-2 UTF-32/UCS-4 UTF-EBCDIC On pairs of code points Combining character Compatibility characters Duplicate characters Equivalence Homoglyph Precomposed character list Z-variant Variation sequences Regional Indicator Symbol Emoji skin color Usage Domain names (IDN) Email Fonts HTML entity references numeric references Input International Ideographs Core Related standards Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) GB 18030 ISO/IEC 8859 ISO 15924 Related topics Anomalies ConScript Unicode Registry Ideographic Research Group International Components for Unicode People involved with Unicode Han unification Scripts and symbols in Unicode Common and inherited scripts Combining marks Diacritics Punctuation Space Numbers Modern scripts Adlam Arabic Armenian Balinese Bamum Batak Bengali Bopomofo Braille Buhid Burmese Canadian Aboriginal Chakma Cham Cherokee CJK Unified Ideographs (Han) Cyrillic Deseret Devanagari Geʽez Georgian Greek Gujarati Gunjala Gondi Gurmukhi Hangul Hanifi Rohingya Hanja Hanunuo Hebrew Hiragana Javanese Kanji Kannada Katakana Kayah Li Khmer Lao Latin Lepcha Limbu Lisu (Fraser) Lontara Malayalam Masaram Gondi Mende Kikakui Medefaidrin Miao (Pollard) Mongolian Mru N'Ko New Tai Lue Nüshu Nyiakeng Puachue Hmong Odia Ol Chiki Osage Osmanya Pahawh Hmong Pau Cin Hau Pracalit (Newa) Ranjana Rejang Samaritan Saurashtra Shavian Sinhala Sorang Sompeng Sundanese Syriac Tagbanwa Tai Le Tai Tham Tai Viet Tamil Telugu Thaana Thai Tibetan Tifinagh Tirhuta Vai Wancho Warang Citi Yi Ancient and historic scripts Ahom Anatolian hieroglyphs Ancient North Arabian Avestan Bassa Vah Bhaiksuki Brāhmī Carian Caucasian Albanian Coptic Cuneiform Cypriot Dives Akuru Dogra Egyptian hieroglyphs Elbasan Elymaic Glagolitic Gothic Grantha Hatran Imperial Aramaic Inscriptional Pahlavi Inscriptional Parthian Kaithi Kharosthi Khitan small script Khojki Khudawadi Khwarezmian (Chorasmian) Linear A Linear B Lycian Lydian Mahajani Makasar Mandaic Manichaean Marchen Meetei Mayek Meroitic Modi Multani Nabataean Nandinagari Ogham Old Hungarian Old Italic Old Permic Old Persian cuneiform Old Sogdian Old Turkic Palmyrene ʼPhags-pa Phoenician Psalter Pahlavi Runic Sharada Siddham Sogdian South Arabian Soyombo Sylheti Nagri Tagalog (Baybayin) Takri Tangut Ugaritic Yezidi Zanabazar Square Notational scripts Duployan SignWriting Symbols, emojis Cultural, political, and religious symbols Currency Mathematical operators and symbols Phonetic symbols (including IPA) Emoji  Category: Unicode  Category: Unicode blocks Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Specials_(Unicode_block)&oldid=990211538" Categories: Unicode blocks Unicode Hidden categories: Articles with short description Short description matches Wikidata Articles needing additional references from April 2010 All articles needing additional references Short description is different from Wikidata Articles containing German-language text Navigation menu Personal tools Not logged in Talk Contributions Create account Log in Namespaces Article Talk Variants Views Read Edit View history More Search Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Donate Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Tools What links here Related changes Upload file Special pages Permanent link Page information Cite this page Wikidata item Print/export Download as PDF Printable version In other projects Wiktionary Languages العربية Deutsch Español Français Italiano 日本語 Русский اردو Edit links This page was last edited on 23 November 2020, at 12:44 (UTC). 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