Use for questions concerning characters that either 1) are not individual letters, numbers, or punctuation symbols shown on the keys of your keyboard, or 2) are treated differently from their literal value in a "coding" situation, such as interpretation as wildcard or metacharacters.
Questions tagged [special-characters]
294 questions
129
votes
4 answers
Why shouldn’t I use Unicode characters to simulate typographic styles (such as small caps or script)?
Unicode contains various characters that look like typographically stylised variants of characters of the basic Latin alphabet and that allow one to write texts in the corresponding typographic styles without resorting to mark-up or similar. For…
Wrzlprmft
- 2,803
- 5
- 22
- 32
98
votes
7 answers
Why are special characters such as "carriage return" represented as "^M"?
Why is ^M used to represent a carriage return in VIM and other contexts?
My guess is that M is the 13th letter of the Latin alphabet and a carriage return is \x0D or decimal 13. Is this the reason? Is this representation documented anywhere?
I…
dotancohen
- 11,720
90
votes
37 answers
How to force Windows to rename a file with a special character?
I have a song that Windows can't play because there is a question mark in the name of the file.
"Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?.ogg" // as an example
So I try to rename it and Windows complains whether I try it in Explorer or from command…
codeLes
- 1,852
65
votes
14 answers
Italian keyboard: entering tilde (~) and backtick (`) characters without changing keyboard layout
Here is what the layout of an Italian keyboard looks like:
As you can see, the curly braces, which are absolutely necessary to
write code in any of C, C++, JavaScript, Java, Objective-C, and others,
appear in purple in this picture. This is because…
John Sonderson
- 3,746
55
votes
5 answers
Notepad++ inserting special Unicode characters in UTF-8
What's the best ways to enter special Unicode characters into a Notepad++ document? Do I have to rely on the operating system (Windows)?
Looking for a see-and-click solution.
I can bring up the ASCII Insertion Panel with Edit | Character Panel —…
Bob Stein
- 1,483
54
votes
12 answers
Is there a Pac-Man-like character in ASCII or Unicode?
Simple question: is there a character that looks either like Pac-Man, or like the ghost in Pac-Man?
With Google's recent Pac-Man logo, everyone should know what these look like, but in case you don't here are some sample images:
If you answer "no"…
Ricket
- 1,606
48
votes
2 answers
What is this character: '*'?
A friend pasted a command into a Slack chat room which contained the character *. This looks like a normal * but isn't:
$ uniprops '*'
uniprops: no character named ‹*›
While if I run uniprops on the asterisk I get when typing on my machine, I…
terdon
- 54,564
44
votes
8 answers
bash: how to pass command line arguments containing special characters
I've written myself a linux program program that needs a regular expression as input.
I want to call the program in the bash shell and pass that regular expression as a command line argument to the program (there are also other command line…
Christian
- 587
42
votes
5 answers
How do I find out which font contains a certain special character?
Unicode contains a few special "characters" which are not displayable by most fonts. I want to use one of them, a video camera.
It seems that such a character exists indeed, and has the codepoint U+1F4F9. When I visit…
Rumi P.
- 681
40
votes
4 answers
How to use special characters in username/password for HTTP proxy?
I am trying to setup an HTTP proxy on a Windows machine. Problem is, the password has a special character (@) in it that is causing the set command to fail.
I have tried both escaping the character (\@) and percent-encoding it with the hex value…
pyropenguin
- 401
32
votes
7 answers
Why do English characters require fewer bytes to represent than other alphabets?
When I put 'a' in a text file, it makes it 2 bytes but when I put, let's say 'ա', which is a letter from Armenian alphabet, it makes it 3 bytes.
What is the difference between alphabets for a computer?
Why does English take less space?
khajvah
- 788
31
votes
2 answers
Getting  and â characters in Linux PuTTY console
I am very much annoyed by â and  being outputted in the manual outputs of most commands I run.
Can someone please suggest a solution?
I am using PuTTY in SSH mode and my Linux server is customized by Amazon EC2.
echo $TERM
xterm
´B´…
P K
- 2,233
29
votes
2 answers
What kind of special character is this: ?
I see someone wrote this comment in a Facebook post:
...and I'm quickly interested in finding what kind of character is that, so I googled it, but the search results return the ordinary text as "heavens gate", not the stylized one.
What kind of…
Rizki Pratama
- 330
28
votes
2 answers
How to input special characters w/o numpad?
How do I type special characters (Alt+0???) in Windows on a laptop without any kind of numeric keyboard (even not one accessed by FN)?
Right now I am using the NT 4 charmap (the XP one sucks), but does anyone know of a more efficient way?
kinokijuf
- 8,364
27
votes
8 answers
Typing strange letters¿ w/o numpad?
How do i type ♣ (alt+5) and ♥ (alt+259) and other characters like it on a keyboard w/o a numberpad? using the numbers 1-9-0 doesnt activate those characters. Note i want to TYPE and not use that windows program to select/copy/paste
user3109