Unicode Text Converter

http://www.panix.com/~eli/unicode/convert.cgi?text=The+secret+is+out.+

by sysk • 12 years ago

908 229 12 years ago

panix.com

noobermin• 12 years ago

Ｑｕｉｔｅａｗａｙｔｏｍａｋｅｔｈｅｐｏｉｎｔ．

Systemic333• 12 years ago

Well that definitely takes the 𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕫𝕖 for most noticeable Hacker News submission.

Suggestion (if you are author): There are a lot of chars that look like another char, often used on the web, so i think that there are more advanced versions to be made. I think i read that a lot of thai signs and cyrillic look like latin chars.

samuellevy• 12 years ago

Yeah, it's great fun to put a cyrillic "а" into a variable name in code.

Systemic333• 12 years ago

Oh it can get much much worse... have a look at greek questionmark: "[...] canonically decomposes to U+003B ; semicolon making the marks identical in practice." [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark#Greek_question_ma...

solistice4• 12 years ago

or having your variable names in _𝕱𝖗𝖆𝖐𝖙𝖚𝖗 which might be more appearent but none the less annoying. That'd make a nice useless language though.

  𝖕𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖎𝖈 𝖛𝖔𝖎𝖉[] 𝖒𝖆𝖎𝖓(𝖘𝖙𝖗𝖎𝖓𝖌[] 𝖆𝖗𝖌𝖘) {
    𝕮𝖔𝖓𝖘𝖔𝖑𝖊.𝖂𝖗𝖎𝖙𝖊𝕷𝖎𝖓𝖊("𝕳𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖔 𝖂𝖊𝖑𝖙");  
  }
  // 𝕽𝖊𝖈𝖍𝖊𝖓𝖒𝖆𝖘𝖈𝖍𝖎𝖓𝖊𝖓𝖘𝖕𝖗𝖆𝖈𝖍𝖊 "𝕱𝖗𝖆𝖐𝖙𝖚𝖗" 𝕰𝖎𝖓𝖘 𝕻𝖚𝖓𝖐𝖙 𝕹𝖚𝖑𝖑 𝕹𝖚𝖑𝖑

dfkf• 12 years ago

If you happen to use cyrillic in your source code (for comments or even strings) and constantly switch between latin and cyrillic, then this actually happens with а "c" letter, because both latin and cyrillic "c" occupy the same button. And that's not fun, btw.

gegenschall2• 12 years ago

Well Python 2 "protects" you from silly things like that and throws a syntax error.

  In [4]: class АnotherClass():
     ...:     pass
    File "<ipython-input-4-ad6e67ea5e19>", line 1
      class АnotherClass():
            ^
  SyntaxError: invalid syntax

kirushik• 12 years ago

Russian government officials are obliged to put all their purchases on the online tender platform.

So they are using this trick (but in the opposite direction, latin `a` instead of cyrillic `а`) to avoid undesired competitors from entering those biddings and lowering the purchase prices (and not paying kickbacks, obviously). https://navalny-en.livejournal.com/52565.html

thaumasiotes2• 12 years ago

Cyrillic, sure. But Thai? Their alphabet is credited to one พ่อขุนรามคำแหงมหาราช. I've never thought there was any resemblance between Thai symbols and Latin ones, but... judge for yourself, I guess?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_alphabet

contingencies2• 12 years ago

Credited is a strong word. AFAIK linguists agree it was copied largely from Khmer (Cambodian).

scott_s• 12 years ago

I think the original submission announcing unicode support may win that prize: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=111100

gegenschall2• 12 years ago

Wow, that page crashes Chromium (Linux, 38.0.2125.111) every time I open it.

jmhobbs• 12 years ago

These are called Homoglyphs, right? I remember reading an article about phishing that used these characters to register almost perfect looking domain names.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph

robjh2• 12 years ago

For others without that specific font or what have you: "Unicode Text Converter"

On my windows box with chrome all i see are empty boxes.

TheAnimus• 12 years ago

Use IE (wow, don't say that often) it has much better typography support, if you are on a high DPI display, chrome just looks awful.

rossy4• 12 years ago

if you are on a high DPI display, chrome just looks awful

I'm fairly sure this is no longer the case. Chrome is high-DPI aware on Windows now, and it uses DirectWrite for font rendering, the same as IE. It just can't display these characters for some reason.

robjh2• 12 years ago

That's interesting. These comments make a lot more sense in IE11.

𝒃𝒆𝒔𝒕 𝒗𝒊𝒆𝒘𝒆𝒅 𝒊𝒏 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒏𝒆𝒕 𝒆𝒙𝒑𝒍𝒐𝒓𝒆𝒓 11

This reminds me of the 1990s. haha

stoolpigeon• 12 years ago

On my Fedora box with Chrome negative circled, squared and negative squared don't show up but everything else does. Firefox and Konqueror are the same so I imagine it is a font issue.

rikkus2• 12 years ago

Here too - except in the title (tab) - I can see the text.

tormeh4• 12 years ago

Same with Chrome and Opera on Android 5.0

teach• 12 years ago

Same here. I wonder why Chrome on Windows doesn't work.

Fortunately I'd seen this story on my Ubuntu box before leaving home, so I wasn't totally out of the loop.

halviti• 12 years ago

I thought it was emoticons at first. Now I can see the title.

Works fine on chrome for mac, doesn't work on chrome for windows.

lsaferite• 12 years ago

What's weird for me is that Chrome 38 on Win 8.1 is showing the title in the tab but is just boxes on the actual page.

tehmaco• 12 years ago

I had the same problem - this page has some fonts you can download, which fixed the problem for me (Windows 7, Chrome 38)

http://gschoppe.com/fixing-unicode-support-in-google-chrome/

touristtam• 12 years ago

Thanks I was having the same issue on Windows 7 Chromium v39

hliyan• 12 years ago

Impressive! Hopefully, this won't end with HN sanitizing everything except latin + latin extended from submissions.

Cthulhu_2• 12 years ago

Well it does / should make people rethink allowing UTF-8 by default in user-generated content. I wonder if the stuff generated by http://www.eeemo.net/ works here:

Z̡̖̥̙̱͓A̶͚̬̺L̷͖͓Ģ͕O̳̮!̗

rikkus2• 12 years ago

Nice utility. What should I tag it with in my bookmarks though?

joezydeco2• 12 years ago

#فͤ҈ͨͥ҉҉ͦ҈҉ͨ҈ͩ҉ͪ҈ͣͯͫ҉ͥͬͨ҈ͭ҉ͮ҈ͯ҉ͨ҈ͭͭͬ҉ͧͥ҈ͣ҉ͨ҉҉҈ͧͥ҉ͯ҈ͮͥ҉ͭ҈ͤ҈ͦ҈ͥ҉ͧ҈ͩͯ҉ͭ҈ͨ҉ͨͥ҉҉ͣ҉ͣͪ҉ͧ҈ͭ҉ͩ҈ͤ҉ͮ҈ͯͥ҈ͬ҈ͭ҈ͦ҈ͨͣ҉ͥ҈ͯ҉҉ͣͧ҈ͫ҉ͭ҈ͥͯͯ҉ͦ҈ͥ҉ͧ҉҈ͩ҉ͭ҈ͣͨ҉ͣͥ҈ͪ҉ͧ҈ͭᅠ'̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏ ᅠᅠ'̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋ กิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิก้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้ก็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็ก้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้ก็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็กิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ͧͣͤͥͦ ͣͤͥͦͧ ͤͥͦͧͣ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ͧͣͤͥͦ ͣͤͥͦͧ ͤͥͦͧͣ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ͧͣͤͥͦ ͣͤͥͦͧ ͤͥͦͧͣ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ͧͣͤͥͦ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ͧͣͤͥͦ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ▲▲▲̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏ Works for me.

tempodox• 12 years ago

It works :)

𝑼𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐𝒅𝒆 𝑻𝒆𝒙𝒕 𝑪𝒐𝒏𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒕𝒆𝒓

comes in a fancy bold italic font in my HN list. I love this hack.

eterm• 12 years ago

Oddly in Firefox the tab name showing the title only gets as far as 𝑼𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐 before giving up with what looks like a box with D835 in it.

acqq• 12 years ago

The tab name is shortened in the middle of the sequence.

I still don't know what the sequence is though, any Unicode expert to explain? Apparently is d835 "invalid"?

http://www.charbase.com/d835-unicode-invalid-character

Edit: I see now emillon explains:

"U+1D48F whose UTF-16 BE encoding is d8 35 dc 8f."

That's:

http://codepoints.net/U+1D48F

"MATHEMATICAL BOLD ITALIC SMALL N"

razzmataz• 12 years ago

I get 𝑼𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐...

sanxiyn• 12 years ago

https://twitter.com/benbjohnson/status/533848879423578112

gojomo2• 12 years ago

Hey! I was just thinking about this site, and visited it for the first time in years, after mentioning the old San Francisco ransom-font in another thread.

By randomly mixing these Unicode letter and letterlike characters, you can simulate a cut-and-paste ransom-note. For example, an acquired company could announce changes to its privacy policy:

  wE ℎåve yøuR ρrIvᴀçy ⅈn a ᴡiNdøwleSs ℞oøm,
  & ℙℓaℕ τø ⅆo µnSρεaKᴀble †hiℕℊs t○ ⅈt

hanula• 12 years ago

Heh, I created something like that in Python: https://github.com/hanula/weirdify while playing with unicodedata module.

horse_continuum• 12 years ago

One of my friends, moving to China for a semester to teach, was thinking of using a proper Chinese name to make it easier for students to address him. He had a good idea, even, which he shared on Facebook.

I proposed that we should name him after the lack of unicode support in our browsers, and we ended up calling him "Box Boxbox" for a couple of months.

kcorbitt• 12 years ago

Just a PSA for discoverability: since the replacement characters use different code points than their more standard equivalents, the default HN search (https://hn.algolia.com) at least doesn't find this submission when searching for "unicode."

emillon2• 12 years ago

Funny how it triggered a bug in Firefox. When the tab is unfocused, its title in the handle is "𝑼𝒏…", but when it gets the focus it becomes "𝑼<D835>…" (in a square box). The next codepoint is U+1D48F whose UTF-16 BE encoding is d8 35 dc 8f.

I'd say that the truncation algorithm operates on bytes and that it can't make sense of d8 35, but I'm not too sure how to fix that since graphemes can have arbitrary length (right?). Do you have to compute the width in advance?

jabiko• 12 years ago

It seems like this is a known bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=921528

anon1385• 12 years ago

http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/

There are libraries for doing it in Javascript: https://www.npmjs.org/package/grapheme-breaker (is that part of the Firefox UI done in Javascript? I've no idea)

pwnna• 12 years ago

Hm.. i'm on nightly and seems to be unaffected by this problem.

emillon2• 12 years ago

It depends on the size of the tab headers.

pc86• 12 years ago

I am using FF Dev Edition and see "Unico<D835>..." regardless of focus. Weird.

aninhumer• 12 years ago

I'd say that the truncation algorithm operates on bytes

This seems likely, as another notable weirdness is that even with full width tabs, where there's plenty of space for at least "𝑼𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐𝒅𝒆 𝑻𝒆𝒙𝒕..." it still only shows "𝑼𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐...".

rossy4• 12 years ago

I wish this worked on Windows/Chrome, or I knew why it didn't work so I could star the issue on their bug tracker.

tmmm• 12 years ago

How does it work?

gojomo2• 12 years ago

Interesting; the title displayed OK minutes ago, on the main page, in Firefox/OSX. But now it's showing as unsupported-glyph boxes inside the page... but still looks OK in the titlebar of the item (comments) page.

Did some automated or administrative process mutate the characters? Or is this just Firefox drifting, in choice of font?

spindritf2• 12 years ago

Also, strike-through. Which is the one I find genuinely useful because I like the suggestive way to say s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ then visibly correcting to something else.

http://adamvarga.com/strike/

endgame• 12 years ago

People have written ^H and ^W since forever^W^Wfor a very long timg.

spindritf2• 12 years ago

Those are lost on many people nowadays. And strike through imho looks better.

Kiro• 12 years ago

Twitch chat will love this.

sthlm• 12 years ago

In Javascript, many unicode characters are allowed [0], so háćḱéŕŃéẃś is a valid variable name [1].

Note: The number of іllэБіъlэVаѓіаъlэИамэѕ [2] used in your production code is inversely proportional to the number of friends you'll make in the maintenance team.

[0] https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-identifiers

[1] https://mothereff.in/js-variables#h%C3%A1%C4%87%E1%B8%B1%C3%...

[2] http://www.panix.com/~eli/unicode/convert.cgi?text=illegible...

jarek• 12 years ago

I had quite a lot of fun defining 汉字 variable names in C#. Though definitely not something to put into production code of course...

hesselink2• 12 years ago

Strangely, for me on Firefox 33.1 on OS X, the title shows up fine on the main page. But when I click through to the comment, I get boxes only, and from then on, the main page also doesn't work anymore until I restart Firefox. I suspect an extension, but I'm not sure.

hesselink2• 12 years ago

Found it, it was https://github.com/darrinhenein/VerticalTabs.

grimgrin• 12 years ago

My friend made a similar tool that you may enjoy:

http://antglove.com/erger

akavel• 12 years ago

And seems to have more "proper fonts" than the originally linked one, actually.

huuu2• 12 years ago

𝕯𝖔𝖊𝖘 𝖆𝖓𝖞𝖔𝖓𝖊 𝖐𝖓𝖔𝖜 𝖜𝖍𝖞 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖊 𝖍𝖊𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙 𝖔𝖋 𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖘𝖊 𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖗𝖆𝖈𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖘 𝖎𝖘 𝖘𝖔 𝖍𝖎𝖌𝖍?

scarygliders2• 12 years ago

𝕀'𝕞 𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕥𝕥𝕪 𝕤𝕦𝕣𝕖 𝕒 𝕥𝕙𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕕 𝕠𝕗 𝕣𝕖𝕡𝕝𝕚𝕖𝕤 𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕚𝕣𝕖𝕝𝕪 𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕤𝕖 𝕦𝕟𝕚𝕔𝕠𝕕𝕖-𝕔𝕠𝕟𝕧𝕖𝕣𝕥𝕖𝕕 𝕥𝕖𝕩𝕥𝕤 𝕨𝕚𝕝𝕝 𝕓𝕖𝕘𝕚𝕟 𝕥𝕠 𝕘𝕖𝕥 𝕠𝕝𝕕 𝕢𝕦𝕚𝕔𝕜𝕝𝕪 ;)

solistice4• 12 years ago

Hey, we got this toy and we want to play with it.

There's this great quote that anything that was fun when you were five is still fun when you're thirty five, and playing around with funky letters was certainly fun at the age of 5.

huuu2• 12 years ago

It was a serious question tho..

guardian5x2• 12 years ago

I only saw boxes in the title with Chrome 38. Tried out IE10 and it works just fine.

rplnt2• 12 years ago

Boxes with (Blink) Opera as well. Works in firefox.

guardian5x2• 12 years ago

I just noticed that in the Chrome tabs it shows the title correctly, i guess its because it just uses Windows unicode support there. But everywhere else its not showing.

umurkontaci• 12 years ago

Chrome 38 on MacOSX Yosemite. Works just fine both focused and unfocused.

TorKlingberg• 12 years ago

Does anyone know why there are separate Unicode code points for letters in bold, bold italic and Fraktur? Normally this sort of thing should be handled by different fonts / font variants. Is it for compatibility with some legacy encoding?

rossy4• 12 years ago

They're mathematical symbols. I guess they're for situations where, say, a double-struck letter has a different meaning to the regular letter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Alphanumeric_Symbo...

lazyjones• 12 years ago

Great, now we'll have to rely on IDEs with clickable drop-down lists of variables and function names because simple text input just got a lot harder for languages where Unicode is allowed for symbols!

http://play.golang.org/p/2zYfCx_J-O

1010• 12 years ago

Presumably, we are now in a situation where it is actually more difficult to learn computer programming if you happen to have had the misfortune to be born into a 'non-western' language and, to some extent, even non-english. That is an absurd situation and means that, as a collective species, we are wasting a huge amount of resources and potential. Definitely something we should look to resolve.

Having a drop-down for variables certainly isn't a solution, granted. Hopefully, there are some more sensible compromises - e.g. being able to specify a locale-dependent subset of unicode in your personal environment, appropriate use of metadata to describe the language of a file, etc.

recursive• 12 years ago

Auto-complete is already in most decent editors and almost every IDE.

rplnt2• 12 years ago

Does not really work for characters like úôä, not sure if there isn't anything similar in those "styles" or it was just ignored.

MrBuddyCasino3• 12 years ago

This surprises me, what exactly is the point of encoding what are essentially different fonts in unicode? Isn't that the job of the presentation layer?

(the Fraktur variant is awesome btw, and is apparently in the valid unicode range for Java...)

masklinn3• 12 years ago

The graphical difference has semantic significance in some domains: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Alphanumeric_Symbo...

Flimm• 12 years ago

Indeed, this is technically a misuse of Unicode.

MrBuddyCasino3• 12 years ago

I guess that makes sense.

Personally I find it annoying how mathematical notation seems so intractable today. Things that are easily understood in code for me are a mystery in math notation. But I guess there will never be an overhaul with a more intuitive typography...

Houshalter2• 12 years ago

You can copy and paste them, use them in applications that don't support formatting, save them to a text file, etc.

afandian• 12 years ago

For an enlightening read, buy a copy of the Unicode standard. An amazing book, containing what I think is the single greatest achievement in anthropology. And read about the history and the imperfect process that has produced a system with duplicates, inconsistencies, but a system nonetheless.

petercooper• 12 years ago

If you like this sort of thing, you might like this piece I wrote some time back about writing a Ruby script using whitespace for all identifiers: http://www.rubyinside.com/the-split-is-not-enough-whitespace...

TheLoneWolfling2• 12 years ago

This sounds like it could be abused.

Someone submitting a path to an open-source program (in Ruby) with a NBSP somewhere that changes the program logic or something. (a<NBSP>or<NBSP>b, where earlier you did a<NBSP>or<NBSP>b=x, or something similar, is the first example that comes to mind.

TheLoneWolfling2• 12 years ago

Whoops. Patch, not path.

edent• 12 years ago

This is the w̶o̶r̶s̶t̶ b̲e̲s̲t̲ use of Unicode!

shaurz• 12 years ago

What is the point of having different codepoints for FONTS in Unicode? What a load of nonsense.

Arnt3• 12 years ago

Unicode generally includes these things because an older encoding did, in the name of roundtrip compability. I expect some older font encoding did it to cater to people who need more than 26 symbols in their maths papers. Let 𝒉 be the...

Unicode's name for 𝒉 explains it all, really.

lmm• 12 years ago

And yet the Unicode consortium went with Han unification, which is still blocking adoption for a significant potential userbase (pretty much any software that needs to display Japanese names).

TazeTSchnitzel5• 12 years ago

They're not encoding different fonts. They're encoding distinct character forms, often necessary for historical texts and such. Some of these are actually symbols, too.

Houshalter2• 12 years ago

☐☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐

tezza2• 12 years ago

🆃🅷🅴🆁🅴 🅶🅾🅴🆂 🆁🅴🅰🅳🅰🅱🅸🅻🅸🆃🆈, 🆂🅴🅰🆁🅲🅷🅰🅱🅸🅻🅸🆃🆈

crb• 12 years ago

Ctrl-F "there goes" found this comment just fine.

tezza2• 12 years ago

No dice on my system, in-page search does not work. Mac or Windows Firefox.

Also some of the menu of glyphs are only visual analogues, not 1-1 replacements.

Plenty of systems and indexers will not be sophisticated enough to cope.

This may be very frustrating if you have visual impairments and need a screen reader.

netheril96• 12 years ago

𝕿𝖍𝖎𝖘 𝖋𝖊𝖊𝖑𝖘 𝖑𝖎𝖐𝖊 𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖗𝖎𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝖍𝖆𝖈𝖐 𝖇𝖚𝖙 𝕴 𝖑𝖎𝖐𝖊 𝖎𝖙. 𝕹𝖔𝖜 𝕴 𝖈𝖆𝖓 𝖚𝖘𝖊 𝖆𝖑𝖑 𝖐𝖎𝖓𝖉𝖘 𝖔𝖋 𝖋𝖆𝖓𝖈𝖞 𝖋𝖔𝖗𝖒𝖆𝖙𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖔𝖓 𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖘𝖊 𝖘𝖎𝖙𝖊𝖘 𝖙𝖍𝖆𝖙 𝖉𝖔𝖊𝖘𝖓'𝖙 𝖘𝖚𝖕𝖕𝖔𝖗𝖙 𝖋𝖔𝖗𝖒𝖆𝖙𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖌.

masklinn3• 12 years ago

Except when the site in question is completely broken wrt astral codepoints.

Which is unexpectedly common as MySQL's "utf8" can't handle codepoints outside the BMP and will just truncate text at the first astral codepoint[0]. You need MySQL 5.5.3 (because adding a whole new encoding in a minor version makes perfect sense) and "utf8mb4" (because why would a codec called "utf8" actually do UTF8?). And then the regex are probably broken because it's PHP and developers use neither UNICODE mode nor properties (PCRE's "\w" will not match all unicode letters, you need "\p{L}" for that, also note that e.g. "🆄" is a symbol not a letter, although "𝔹" is a letter)

[0] https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/mysql-utf8mb4

TazeTSchnitzel5• 12 years ago

MySQL is horrible for all the same reasons PHP is horrible, and this applies to Unicode too, except PHP is actually trying to fix its Unicode problems (UTF8 is the default now, moves towards adding a UString class), while MySQL isn't fixing them.

egypturnash• 12 years ago

Like 𝑻𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒓! https://twitter.com/egypturnash/status/535105548761309184

pud• 12 years ago

I made an iPhone app that does kind of the same thing, but converts letters to their upside-down unicode equivalent. It's fun for sending upside-down texts.

Free and ad-free, just a fun project:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/texting-upside-down-free/id4...

thomasfl• 12 years ago

Now you have an idea for how to extend it with funny fonts as well.

tgcordell• 12 years ago

Would it be possible to use the new third party keyboard API in iOS8 to have a regular styled keyboard that types in an upside down fashion? This would allow the user to continue having the same input experience, but translate the output experience? Once confirmed this is possible, you could take OP's idea and apply as well.

drfuchs• 12 years ago

On my vanilla iPhone 6, all it does is turn the whole screen white.

sakri• 12 years ago

fun for passwords

grayclhn• 12 years ago

I look forward to a Hacker News front page that looks like a ransom note.

protomyth• 12 years ago

I think of it as a karma backlash from Apple naming a new font San Fransisco for the iWatch instead of leaving the name for the old ransom font.

jfmercer• 12 years ago

I couldn't help but notice that this converter was copyrighted by Eli the Bearded. Google "Eli the Bearded", but not from work. You'll get some very interesting results.

https://encrypted.google.com/#q=Eli%20the%20Bearded

hbbio• 12 years ago

Oh, no !

The cat should have stayed in a box, if this gains too much popularity, HN will read like MySpace back in the days.

And top HN news will be: "A browser plugin that translates Unicode back to ASCII".

shaunpud• 12 years ago

𝓒𝓸𝓸𝓵 𝓼𝓽𝓸𝓻𝔂 𝓫𝓻𝓸

ceejayoz• 12 years ago

Expect subsequent uses of this to get flagkilled into oblivion.

errnoh• 12 years ago

The problem is that this doesn't stop here. This method works everywhere and it will spread.

We'll need a plugin to reverse this, anyone up for it?

peterwwillis• 12 years ago

Go to your browser's menu bar, click 'View', go to 'Character Encoding', and select 'Western (ISO-8859-1)'. Now it's just garbage characters. (It's not reversed, but at least it's not bold?)

floatrock• 12 years ago

I saw a thing recently where a unicode encoding trick was used in an oauth phishing scam -- using unicode characters, a scammer was able to make an oauth connector that looked like the real company but passed through the company's "if (oauthConnector.name.toLowercase().contains('our name')) { throw new DenyError();}" check.

The user though the oauth app was legit because it was the "same" as the company name, accepted the connection, and promptly had their account emptied: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2lt76n/warning_coi...

Now, it's up for debate whether any (psuedo?) financial institution should offer full oauth access (at least without having a human review possible oauth connectors), but the point is, decorative hackernews submissions are the least malicious use of this trick.

gus_massa• 12 years ago

This is similar to the pseudolocalization (þšéûðöļöçåļîžåţîöñ), that adds random accents to English word to test the localization capabilities of a program without requiring another language knowledge.

An online version: http://www.pseudolocalize.com/

A library: http://code.google.com/p/pseudolocalization-tool/

fiatjaf• 12 years ago

.ǝɔıu ɹǝdns sɐʍ sıɥʇ

yAnonymous• 12 years ago

𝓘 𝔀𝓸𝓷𝓭𝓮𝓻 𝓱𝓸𝔀 𝔀𝓮𝓵𝓵 𝓝𝓢𝓐 𝓓𝓟𝓘 𝓼𝔂𝓼𝓽𝓮𝓶𝓼 𝓱𝓪𝓷𝓭𝓵𝓮 𝓽𝓱𝓲𝓼.

kalops• 12 years ago

teh cancer that is HN. predicting next post someone shows off rageflipping text

geekam• 12 years ago

This fails to show up on my iPhone 5S Safari and I thought it supported Unicode.

DanBC• 12 years ago

Chrome on iOS is giving me the character unavailable boxes. Normally I'd just change the font but I can't do that here.

This doesn't feel like the future.

calineczka• 12 years ago

Finally a way to express myself on facebook properly ;) I wonder if bold text would lead to better conversion from ads using this trick. And I wonder when is facebook going to ban this because obviously it works :)

PSeitz• 12 years ago

𝓚𝓐𝓦𝓐𝓘

cturner• 12 years ago

Different problem, but someone who knows about unicode will probably know this -

When I paste from microsoft documents into putty, characters will often be transformed to weird versions. Example - emdash is a different character to '-'. It comes through as a weird tilda character instead of a dash. Mmm. Frustating.

Is there a robust program you can run on putty to catch such type and flatten it to ascii?

benjaminjackman• 12 years ago

I use Linux but there are similar problems, I usually will paste text like that into sublime to remove all the special formatting, then re-copy paste it. I also found this stack overflow post, which mentions a program (puretext) that maps win+v to do a text only paste: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/122404/how-to-copy-and-pa...

Siecje• 12 years ago

Does Ctrl+Shift+v (paste without formatting) work?

cm2012• 12 years ago

On my android all the unicode characters (including the title) are blank.

sjwright• 12 years ago

The question I have is, what's the easiest way to strip this 🅹🆄🅽🅺 out of unicode strings submitted by web users? With a nod to Cunningham's Law, surely the right answer is a regular expression?

atlbeer• 12 years ago

Depends on the language... but, the "correct" answer is support unicode and welcome yourself into a world of pain.

dsjoerg2• 12 years ago

Glad you put "correct" in scare quotes, because that "correct" answer is certainly not correct.

NaNaN• 12 years ago

You can use “Adobe Blank”[1] and CSS @font-face{unicode-range:} to hide them.

[1] https://github.com/adobe-fonts/adobe-blank

TazeTSchnitzel5• 12 years ago

So now the text won't show up at all?

Wonderful :/

anjbe2• 12 years ago

I’ve never been a fan of this sort of thing. The Unicode characters in these font blocks are not letters for making words; at least the double‐struck, fraktur, bold, italic, and bold italics are semantically for use in mathematical equations.

This can have some strange effects if you try to use them like letters. Example: What’s the lowercase transform of 𝑼? 𝑼! Not 𝒖.

jrometty• 12 years ago

It should be mentioned that this returns a blank title on the android app.

gpvos• 12 years ago

I do feel that Unicode is slowly jumping the shark.

dsjoerg2• 12 years ago

ᴅᴏᴇꜱ ᴀɴyᴏɴᴇ ᴋɴᴏᴡ ɪꜰ ᴩᴏᴩᴜʟᴀʀ ꜱᴇᴀʀᴄʜ ᴇɴɢɪɴᴇꜱ ᴅᴇ-ᴜɴɪᴄᴏᴅᴇ ᴛᴇxᴛ ᴡʜᴇɴ ɪɴᴅᴇxɪɴɢ?

guipsp• 12 years ago

Google does, atleast for fullwidth.

TazeTSchnitzel5• 12 years ago

Which makes sense, as fullwidth is likely to be accidentally typed when using a Chinese/Japanese/Korean IME, and is entirely equivalent to normal characters, it just fits in with CJK text layouts better.

phpnode• 12 years ago

they definitely don't. Search for "ᴜɴɪᴄᴏᴅᴇ ᴛᴇxᴛ" and you'll see the only matches are exactly that.

TazeTSchnitzel5• 12 years ago

They usually don't, because the text isn't supposed to be equivalent to "non-'Unicode'" text.

parasj• 12 years ago

𝓖𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓽 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓹𝓪𝓼𝓼𝔀𝓸𝓻𝓭𝓼

JulianMorrison• 12 years ago

𝕸𝖊𝖎𝖓 𝕷𝖚𝖋𝖙𝖐𝖎𝖘𝖘𝖊𝖓𝖋𝖆𝖍𝖗𝖟𝖊𝖚𝖌 𝖎𝖘𝖙 𝖛𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖊𝖗 𝕬𝖆𝖑𝖊.

arikrak• 12 years ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7383672 though they changed my title to normal text.

edgarallenbro• 12 years ago

This is great, but why is the Australian translation called 'upside down pseudoalphabet'?

Immortalin• 12 years ago

On iOS 8.1 safari all I see is a bunch of squares ;(

ck2• 12 years ago

Note that XP cannot show

    Negative Circled
    Squared
    Negative Squared
    Double-struck
    Bold
    Bold italic
    Bold script
    Fraktur

At least not with the fonts I have.

aruggirello2• 12 years ago

Firefox on my Ubuntu 14.04 PC cannot show:

    Negative Circled
    Squared
    Negative Squared

codemonkeymike• 12 years ago

Continued use of this would be a good way of making me not use HN.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 12 years ago

I don't really speak/read Russian, but I have a passable understanding of Cyrillic, and those always look dumb. It doesn't look like "the" to be, it looks lik "guh-buh-yeh" or something.

Same thing with the Borat DVD cover.

dang• 12 years ago

Or Toys Ya Us.

getdavidhiggins2• 12 years ago

https://www.unicod.es/

getdavidhiggins2• 12 years ago

ｔｈｉѕ ｉѕ ｇｒéäｔ, ƅüｔ ìｔ'ｓｃｌ߀ｓèԁ ｓòùｒｃè!!!

üｎíｔｏ߀ɭｓ ìѕ ϻùｃհ ƃｅｔｔëｒ!!

https://www.unicod.es/

aruggirello2• 12 years ago

!ꙅᴙɘTliꟻ mAqꙅ ꟻo Tɘꙅ wɘᴎ ɘloHw A ꙅbɘɘᴎ ꙅiHT ,oᴎ HO

sovok• 12 years ago

Very cool. Although the upside-down text doesn't work with ümlauts and numbers. A reverse function would also be nice.

I wrote a similar tool that does this (http://lunicode.com). It's on Github if you want to use the code: https://github.com/combatwombat/Lunicode.js

cgranier3• 12 years ago

What I need is something that takes all the extended characters (think Spanish or Swedish) and turns them into alternative safe versions.

For instance, á into a, ñ into n, å into a, etc.

Had my hopes up when I saw the title.

Does anyone have any ideas or links to working scripts that I can turn into something useful? I need to "sanitize" a database of foreign documentaries before uploading to YouTube (their metadata input system chokes on extended chars). Thanks!

cataphract• 12 years ago

You can use ICU transliterators. Example for the PHP ICU bindings: http://php.net/manual/en/transliterator.transliterate.php#11...

cgranier3• 12 years ago

Thanks. This looks very promising. I'll dig into it and hopefully come out with a clean database ;-)

driax• 12 years ago

When you say safe alternatives, you mean ASCII right. You should think about looking into something which also understand the characters a bit better. For example å,æ,ø can mostly be turned into aa,ae,oe for danish and norwegian. Just turning them into a,?,o would change the meaning.

cgranier3• 12 years ago

Exactly. I need to turn them into something meaningful.

notatoad• 12 years ago

I use a python library called unidecode to do this on my site.

berdario• 12 years ago

Have a look at unidecode

https://github.com/iki/unidecode

Originally Perl, there are ports for python, node, ruby,.Net, etc

Obviously it's imperfect and lossy, but it might be what you want

tibbon• 12 years ago

It appears to work on Facebook and Twitter.

ｉｎｃｅｐｔｉｏｎ

mxfh2• 12 years ago

Since it wasn't mentioned here earlier, it's worth to take a look at shapecatcher to see what glyphs might resemble latin letters.

Scribbling something resembling the latin capital letter A returns for example any of these codepoints: A𝘈ΑАÅ𝖠∆ДΔ𝐴𝟺дᎪߡ𝛢Å4𝛥ᴬᐃⵠ𐌀𝘼𝛬Λ△𝟦Ą𝜟𝓐⌓⧍ᗋ🜂Ⲇ🗻🍙ⲇѦᗩᗅ

http://shapecatcher.com/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5150107)

Also the Unicode Consortium has some reports on security:

http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr36/

http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/

listing all kind of spoofing methods you haven even thought of.

Flott• 12 years ago

This is not good news if it bypasses the spam filters! Does it?

jackmaney• 12 years ago

I'd like to buy a vowel, please. Let's go with "e".

edem• 12 years ago

Can you do z̝̗a͈̣̳͓l͏g̱̭͖̜̙o̢̦̫̯ as well?

seqizz• 12 years ago

I feel nice.. http://i.imgur.com/lbvRWwm.png

qeorge• 12 years ago

I was once bilked into buying some scraped content as original work by this method. It passed copyscape, and my test of Googling a a random sentence in quotes didn't bring anything up. I let it go because I had already accepted the work, and the lesson was worth more than the article anyway.

Don't be fool as I was! Had I manually transcribed a sentence into Google instead of copying + pasting the Unicode chars, I would have found hundreds of copies of the same article.

seba_dos1• 12 years ago

𝕴 𝖋𝖊𝖊𝖑 𝖆 𝖓𝖊𝖜 𝖛𝖎𝖗𝖆𝖑 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖔𝖓 𝖘𝖔𝖈𝖎𝖆𝖑 𝖒𝖊𝖉𝖎𝖆 𝖈𝖔𝖒𝖎𝖓𝖌.

pbhjpbhj• 12 years ago

This has been a ⓣⓗⓘⓝⓖ [thing] for quite some time - guess it might be making a come back, I've seen zalgo (http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/zalgo NSFW; ̖͈̪͙͉̰͈Z͓͎̬͓̯̖A̶̯̝̖͍̥̞L̻G̢̣̘͇̖͍̙O [Zalgo] generator http://www.eeemo.net/) and flip and reverse text live on my Facebook in the past at least.

GregBuchholz3• 12 years ago

            ⎧1               if n = 0;
     F(n) ≡ ⎨1               if n = 1;
            ⎩F(n-1) + F(n-2) if n > 1.
    
    ⎛ ∇∙D⃑ = ρ         ⎞
    ⎜ ∇∙B⃑ = 0         ⎟
    ⎜ ∇×E⃑ = -∂B⃑/∂t    ⎟
    ⎝ ∇×H⃑ = J⃑ + ∂D⃑/∂t ⎠
    
         ⌠¹
    π = 2⎮ √1̅̅-̅̅x̅̅²̅̅ dx
         ⌡₋₁

     ⎡1 0 1⎤ ⎡î⎤
     ⎢0 1 0⎥ ⎢ĵ⎥
     ⎣1 0 1⎦ ⎣k̂⎦

    Γ ⊢ t:S    S<:T
    ―――――――――――――――  (T-Sub)
        Γ ⊢ t:T

            ⎛   1 ⎞ⁿ
    ℯ = lim ⎜1+ ― ⎟
        ⁿ→∞ ⎝   n ⎠

lisper• 12 years ago

That's pretty slick. Did you do that manually?

GregBuchholz3• 12 years ago

    ╔════════════════════╗
    ║ Yes.  All manually ║
    ╙────────────────────╜

GregBuchholz3• 12 years ago

Common lisp reader macros anyone?

    ⎛if ⎛> (+ a b)⎞ ⎛case x      ⎞ ⎛cond              ⎞⎞
    ⎜   ⎝  (- c d)⎠ ⎜    (1 'foo)⎟ ⎜  ((> y 2) 'quux) ⎟⎟
    ⎜               ⎜    (2 'bar)⎟ ⎝  (t       'error)⎠⎟
    ⎝              ⎝    (3 'baz)⎠                   ⎠

...(hmmm. For some reason that looks better in my editor than on the webpage. Apparently a fixed width font isn't necessarily fixed when it comes to unicode).

http://imgur.com/oI0zVm3

cousin_it2• 12 years ago

Nice! That's like ASCII art but with more characters, like U+2320 TOP HALF INTEGRAL, U+23A8 LEFT CURLY BRACKET MIDDLE PIECE, etc.

mxfh2• 12 years ago

Great multiline stuff. Could be improved by using the actual U+2212 minus sign −, not - (U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS) when getting super pedantic. Did something like this last week making extensive use of unicode block 1D400 and different space widths. http://math.typeit.org/ helped as well.

𝑟₁ 𝑣

𝐷 → 𝑅 → 𝑉

𝛼 ↓ ↓ 𝜔

𝐷 → 𝑅 → 𝑉

𝑟₂ 𝑣

https://twitter.com/mxfh/status/532575085337792512

formula is from http://algebraicvis.net/

vjvj• 12 years ago

🆃🅷🅴 🆂🅴🅲🆁🅴🆃 🅸🆂 🅾🆄🆃.

petecooper• 12 years ago

My iOS/Safari shows squares in the page itself, but a row of boxed aliens in the `Bookmarks and History` list:

http://imgur.com/l98p9oN

(image is safe for work, though other stuff on imgur.com is likely not)

ryanjmo• 12 years ago

เ ђคשє Շ๏ Շгץ Շђเร ๏ยՇ.

darkstalker• 12 years ago

I've used this page for a long time. Ｗｒｉｔｉｎｇｓｔｕｆｆｉｎｆｕｌｌｗｉｄｔｈｕｎｉｃｏｄｅｆｏｒｓｕｒｅｍａｋｅｓｉｔｌｏｏｋｍｏｒｅｆｕｎｎｙ

Unicode Text Converter

Related Stories