A spectre is haunting Unicode
Article URL: https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310926 Points: 179 # Comments: 58
In 1997, an investigation was launched to uncover the origins of the mysterious characters known as the ghost characters, or 幽霊文字, in the JIS X 0208 encoding standard. These characters, added to the JIS standard in 1978, have no clear source or historical precedent. The investigation discovered that many of the characters were unintentionally created during the cataloging process, often due to errors or attempts to record place names.
Despite the efforts to trace their origins, some characters, such as 彁, still remain unexplained. These ghost characters, once considered trivial curiosities, are now an integral part of the Unicode standard, present in every computer around the world.
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