Specials (Unicode block)
Unicode block containing some special codepoints and two non-characters / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Specials (Unicode block)?
Summarize this article for a 10 years old
Specials is a short Unicode block of characters allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 code points, five have been assigned since Unicode 3.0:
- U+FFF9 INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION ANCHOR, marks start of annotated text
- U+FFFA INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION SEPARATOR, marks start of annotating character(s)
- U+FFFB INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION TERMINATOR, marks end of annotation block
- U+FFFC  OBJECT REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, placeholder in the text for another unspecified object, for example in a compound document.
- U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized, or unrepresentable character
- U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character.
- U+FFFF <noncharacter-FFFF> not a character.
| Specials | |
|---|---|
| Range | U+FFF0..U+FFFF (16 code points) |
| Plane | BMP |
| Scripts | Common |
| Assigned | 5 code points |
| Unused | 9 reserved code points 2 non-characters |
| Unicode version history | |
| 1.0.0 (1991) | 1 (+1) |
| 2.1 (1998) | 2 (+1) |
| 3.0 (1999) | 5 (+3) |
| Chart | |
| Code chart | |
| Note: [1][2] | |
FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the usual sense, but guaranteed not to be Unicode characters at all. They can be used to guess a text's encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by definition not a correctly encoded Unicode text. Unicode's U+FEFF BYTE ORDER MARK character can be inserted at the beginning of a Unicode text to signal its endianness: a program reading such a text and encountering 0xFFFE would then know that it should switch the byte order for all the following characters.
Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Special.[3]