Re: What Finder character is a diamond with "?" in it?
Re: What Finder character is a diamond with "?" in it?
- Subject: Re: What Finder character is a diamond with "?" in it?
- From: "Steven D. Majewski" <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 12:04:40 -0400
On Sep 14, 2007, at 2:16 AM, Brett Conlon wrote:
Hiya,
The script I wrote to fix Mac names to be PC compliant is choking
on some files. The file names show in the script as question marks
"?" but in the Finder the characters are black diamonds with a
white question mark in it. I've not seen these characters before.
Is this Mac OS X's way of saying it can't display those characters?
The files may have come from another platform.
The error returned is "Can't make \"FileName? (Colour).eps\" into
type string."
That's the unicode replacement glyph ( or character ):
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/fffd/index.htm
http://unicode.org/glossary/#R :
Replacement Character. A character used as a substitute for an
uninterpretable character from another encoding. The Unicode
Standard uses U+FFFD replacement character for this function.
Replacement Glyph. A glyph used to render a character that cannot
be rendered with the correct appearance in a particular font. It
often is shown as an open or black rectangle. Also known as a
missing glyph. (See Section 5.3, Unknown and Missing Characters.)
Some software can be set to replace unknown characters with U+FFFD
(the replacement character)
instead of signaling an error and stopping. ( I see this usually
because encoding has been
mislabeled -- typically because XML defaults to utf-8 with no
declaration, but someone has
used a windows or Latin-* editor and neglected to put in the proper
encoding declaration. )
The replacement glyph is used when display software doesn't recognize
the character.
( This sounds like what you're seeing. )
In that case, the offending "bad" character is not replaced, but it's
rendered in the display
with this glyph. Likely, it's from the same cause: you're trying to
interpret text in some
other encoding as unicode. ( Often because unicode is the default, as
in both Applescript and XML. )
-- Steve Majewski
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
AppleScript-Users mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
Archives: http://lists.apple.com/archives/applescript-users
This email sent to email@hidden