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idemarkupansi

not used characters from ANSI characters set


I'am developing a small programming language together with an IDE.

The ANSI character set states the subset of unused characters. Here is the complete list: 0x7F, 0x81, 0x8D, 0x8F, 0x90, 0x9D

I'd like to use some of them for an invisible code markup, so am wondering how they got printed in different environments. Can I assume they are always a whitespace, or some editors will take the honor to replace them with something like '?' or grey rectangle?

Thank you, Dmitry


Solution

  • You shouldn't assume any specific behavior, as it will depend on the display widget and quite possibly on the font. Either preprocess the text for display or use an out-of-band markup mechanism (for example, many text field widgets let you attach attributes to runs of text).