ASCII Characters

[Bigaldoc]

Boy, it has been a long time since I've tried to deal with "characters" and their ASCII equivalent or whatever. So, here's a trivia question for ya.

A friend of mine made some posts on her Facebook Wall that look like this:

2010-05-07_160000.png

When I asked her about the funny looking characters, she didn't know except that she made the posts by texting from her call phone.

So I tried to "copy" the characters thinking I could look up the ASCII value to see, just for curiosity, what they are. When I copy and paste into a text editor, all I see is:

^

I hate not to know. Can anyone remind me how to find out what those characters are?

[viking33]

Boy, it has been a long time since I've tried to deal with "characters" and their ASCII equivalent or whatever. So, here's a trivia question for ya.

A friend of mine made some posts on her Facebook Wall that look like this:

2010-05-07_160000.png

When I asked her about the funny looking characters, she didn't know except that she made the posts by texting from her call phone.

So I tried to "copy" the characters thinking I could look up the ASCII value to see, just for curiosity, what they are. When I copy and paste into a text editor, all I see is:

^

I hate not to know. Can anyone remind me how to find out what those characters are?

They look more like phat phingering than anything in the ASCII character set?

[HansV]

They are Unicode characters, not ASCII characters; I suspect they're Chinese or something like that, and that your computer doesn't have support for them. But I don't know which characters they are.

[Bigaldoc]

Thanks fellas! I'll just have a beer (or two) and ferget about it. Obviously it isn't important except for my curious brain, but NOT curious enough to learn Chinese or some such. Mebbe her cell phone was made in China.

[John Gray]

They appear to me to be ASCII characters (because they are 0x01, 0x02, 0x03, 0x05) but are represented by Facebook as Unicode characters, with four hex digits/two bytes, as in 0x0001, 0x0002, etc. They are 'control characters' from the old days of modems and teletypes (and before!), right at the bottom (non-printable) end of the ASCII character set. See the top left of this ASCII table.

Why they aren't being stripped out by the relevant software, I wouldn't know. They could be being used for any purpose the mobile phone operator has devised, not necessarily their original meaning, of course!

[Perhaps another reason to avoid Facebook?! ]

[Leif]

Using a combination of the ASCII table and the characters copied into Notepad++, I see this:

x.jpg

so it would seem apparent that these are characters associated with the text message.

I think, however, that the real question is why the characters appear on screen as they do. If the characters are copied to MS Notepad or Word, they appear as 'unprintable' characters:

y.jpg

If I fiddle around with the Character Encoding in Firefox, I can get the entire page appearing in similar, unreadable characters, but that doesn't tell me a lot.

(I use the ASC Excel function to give me the character codes which for ^ are 5 3 94 2 1 )

[HansV]

They appear to me to be ASCII characters (because they are 0x01, 0x02, 0x03, 0x05)

That's probably undoubtedly correct. As you and Leif say, the question remains what they are doing there.

[Bigaldoc]

Wow, thanks John and Leif for all the inside scoop! Next time I see the lady I'll ask her who the mobile provider is, but it certainly isn't important to ME. It might be to her if she's doing a lot of texting similar to the two messages I saw on Facebook. Interesting that she's an IT student at one of our "junior colleges" locally.

No John, I'm having too much fun reconnecting with siblings and friends on Facebook, so I won't be quitting any time soon. I watch its PRIVACY settings very closely and don't play any games there or other silly peripheral stuff.

[MickeyMouse]

No John, I'm having too much fun reconnecting with siblings and friends on Facebook, so I won't be quitting any time soon. I watch its PRIVACY settings very closely and don't play any games there or other silly peripheral stuff.

Darn, I was looking forward to frequenting your diner!

[Cellmate]

On the subject of ASCII, I went one time to a software store, Egghead, I think, looking for a database prog that could read ASCII files.

(Probably all of them!) Anyway, I ask a roving sales kid for what can read ASCII files, pronouncing it "as-key". He looked just SO puzzled.
I explained some more and the light came on and he exlaimed "Oh, you mean A. S. C. two!"

"Ah-umm, that's ok, kid. I can help myself."

Cellmate

[John Gray]

Rather gives the lie to the old tagline, ASCII and you shall receiveii...