Things You Can't Say in Notepad

[Faustian]

Things You Can't Say in Notepad
If you're a Windows user, open Notepad and type in this phrase, without the quote marks and with no carriage return: "Bush hid the facts". Now save it and open it again.

The subversive text is probably gone, replaced by a line of white boxes, or Chinese characters if you have the font.

Weeeird.

It's not the massive right-wing conspiracy it might seem, though. The folks at WinCustomize.com discovered an odd bug in Notepad that's triggered by a text file consisting of a four-letter word, two three-letter words, and a five letter word. Some text does it -- "this app can break" is their example -- some doesn't.

Source: http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/
And Knuckles who told me.

[SIBUK]

hax!!1 one one eleven

[mrproper]

Originally Posted by Faustian

Things You Can't Say in Notepad
If you're a Windows user, open Notepad and type in this phrase, without the quote marks and with no carriage return: "Bush hid the facts". Now save it and open it again.

The subversive text is probably gone, replaced by a line of white boxes, or Chinese characters if you have the font.

Weeeird.

It's not the massive right-wing conspiracy it might seem, though. The folks at WinCustomize.com discovered an odd bug in Notepad that's triggered by a text file consisting of a four-letter word, two three-letter words, and a five letter word. Some text does it -- "this app can break" is their example -- some doesn't.

Source: http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/
And Knuckles who told me.

Dunno, what seems to be the problem, my text still reads "畂桳栠摩琠敨映捡獴"

English xlators...
- □□□touches □□reflects picks □
- □□栠 touches 琠 敨 reflects □□

so it's something in Chinese-simplified charset.

[Faustian]

Originally Posted by mrproper

Dunno, what seems to be the problem, my text still reads "畂桳栠摩琠敨映捡獴"

English xlators...
- □□□touches □□reflects picks □
- □□栠 touches 琠 敨 reflects □□

so it's something in Chinese-simplified charset.

Yea seems to depend on what font you have set.
I got the □□□ in notepad but when pasted to IRC I got ???

[Nea]

i like knuckles
but why he is blocked from this popular EU forum? what does that tell?

[Faustian]

Originally Posted by Nea

i like knuckles
but why he is blocked from this popular EU forum? what does that tell?

Because his mouth thinks faster then his brain...

[Donald]

I tested this thing with different combinations of words in the 4 3 3 5 format, and it returned Chinese characters every time I tried it. Granted, they were different sets of Chinese characters, but always Chinese. How can Microsoft possibly account for this? I don't expect to see bugs like this in a program like Notepad.exe, which has been around for a long time. The specific text strings I used were, "bush hid the facts", "1111 111 111 11111", and "this one can break". Does anyone know the technical reason for this strange behavior? Please tell me if you do.

Sincerely,
Donald

[Falcon4½]

It's definately something to do with the way Notepad initializes Unicode mode.

Unicode characters take two bytes instead of one. Many Windows files are stored in Unicode and you don't even know it because Notepad - the "tell it like it is" editor everyone trusts - hides the Unicode fact and shows it to you like it's plain text.

Something in this weird combination of binary digits switches Notepad into Unicode mode and starts mashing characters together to produce Unicode letters. Usually Unicode files have a small header to note that it's a Unicode file, but Notepad seems to ignore that.

There are some facts you need to know about this bug, though:
- It happens with pretty much ANY combination of four-three-three-five letters. As shown with "vote hof for mukke", "bush hid the facts", "this app can break", and "this txt are longs".
- The produced text WILL NOT translate from Chinese to English or whatever. The only reason you got words out of it before was because some individual characters mean full English words, so it was just working off that.

It's definately a strange bug. Hard to believe Notepad could completely discard the standard Unicode header and work off something completely different... but there you go. I never knew about this bug before... =P

[Nea]

Originally Posted by Faustian

Because his mouth thinks faster then his brain...

good one faust ty for makin me spill my coffee

[101]

Originally Posted by Falcon4½

It's definately something to do with the way Notepad initializes Unicode mode.

Unicode characters take two bytes instead of one. Many Windows files are stored in Unicode and you don't even know it because Notepad - the "tell it like it is" editor everyone trusts - hides the Unicode fact and shows it to you like it's plain text.

Something in this weird combination of binary digits switches Notepad into Unicode mode and starts mashing characters together to produce Unicode letters. Usually Unicode files have a small header to note that it's a Unicode file, but Notepad seems to ignore that.

There are some facts you need to know about this bug, though:
- It happens with pretty much ANY combination of four-three-three-five letters. As shown with "vote hof for mukke", "bush hid the facts", "this app can break", and "this txt are longs".
- The produced text WILL NOT translate from Chinese to English or whatever. The only reason you got words out of it before was because some individual characters mean full English words, so it was just working off that.

It's definately a strange bug. Hard to believe Notepad could completely discard the standard Unicode header and work off something completely different... but there you go. I never knew about this bug before... =P

if you save as unicode it doesn't happen, it seems to be something in the way it handles stuff that isn't unicode. Weird though.

I prefer the conspiracy theory personally.

Winston