Specials (Unicode block)
Unicode block (U+FFF0-FFFF) containing a few interlinear annotation controls and replacement characters, as well as two special code points permanently reserved as non-characters at end of their code plane / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Specials is a short Unicode block of characters put at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 code points, five have been used 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.
Quick Facts Range, Plane ...
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) |
Note: [1][2] |
Close
FFFE and FFFF are not unused in the usual way, but guaranteed not to be Unicode characters at all. They can be used to guess a text's scheme, since any text using these is not a correctly encoded Unicode text. Unicode's U+FEFF BYTE ORDER MARK character can be put at the start of a Unicode text to signal its endianness: a program reading such a text and finding 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]