But for you 8 means I, so you would receive and decode it as IFMMP. If I sent you the message HELLO, then the numbers 8, 5, 12, 12, 15 would whiz across the wires. Let’s say my computer used the number 1 for A, 2 for B, 3 for C, etc and yours used 0 for A, 1 for B, etc. ASCIIĬomputers only deal in numbers and not letters, so it’s important that all computers agree on which numbers represent which letters. Warning: This article contains lots of numbers, including a bit of binary - best approached after your morning cup of coffee. Along the way, you’ll find out more about the history of characters, character sets, Unicode and UTF-8, and why question marks and odd accented characters sometimes show up in databases and text files. This article will follow a few of those characters more closely, as they journey from Web server to browser, and back again. By the end of the story, they will all find their own unique place in this world. But the main focus are the characters: 110,116 of them. There is conflict and resolution, and a happyish ending. It has competition and intrigue, as well as traversing oodles of countries and languages. This is a story that dates back to the earliest days of computers. So there isn't much point in using it it's probably there only for backwards compatibility with some existing legacy character set or something.This article relies heavily on numbers and aims to provide an understanding of character sets, Unicode, UTF-8 and the various problems that can arise. This character is a canonical equivalent with the semicolon character this means that, for all uses, the two are considered the same character. Is this a bug or is intentionally this way?
GREEK QUESTION MARK CHARACTER WINDOWS
Under X Windows (and also in other Operating Systems) this character is not in use (am I correct?) but is used the equivalent English semicolon (003B). Just noticed that in the Unicode character table there is a special character (037E) for the Greek quotation mark. Notes: this, and not U+037E GREEK QUESTION MARK, is the preferred character U+003B SEMICOLON is the preferred character Equivalents: Thus, the rendering engine of the operating system may as well substitute the 037E character with the 003B character, even if there is a glyph available, since the two characters are canonically equivalent as Vasilis said. Quote The preferred character for the greek question mark is 003B (english semicolon), and this is not an advice of the operating systems engineers but of the Unicode charset. It did not form itself from Adam's mouth,Īnd it left in its wake a single teardrop, (From the limited edition of poems A Brief History of Punctuation by Maurya Simon, October 2002) Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss, You can search inside the book.17th c.: By the end of the century the various marks have received their modern names, and the exclamation mark, quotation marks, and the dash had been added to the system.Over time this early symbol simplified to the mark we use today. At first this symbol consisted of a capital 'Q' atop a lowercase 'o'.
Typographic historians contend that the design for the question mark was derived from an abbreviation of the Latin word quaestio (=what).