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unicodecharacterspecial-characters

What character is this:?

EDIT While posting the question, character I ask for was shown well to me, but after postig it does not show up anymore. As it does not appear, please look up in original site

EDIT2 I looked for Unicode chars associated with "alien", and found no matching ones. Here is how they are compared side by side:

two aliens side by side

I found, that some texts inside my database contain character like . I am not sure, how it would rendered with different fonts and environments, so here is the image, how I see it: some weird alien-like character

I tried to identify it with different ways. For example, when I paste it into Sublime Text, it automatically shows as control character <0x85>. When I tried to identify it in different unicode-detectors (http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Unicode/whatisit.html, https://unicode-table.com/en/, https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl), their conclusion is pretty match the same: 

Uni­code code point char­acter             U+0085
UTF-8 en­co­ding                           c2 85 hexa­decimal
                                         194 133 deci­mal
                                         0302 0205 octal
Uni­co­de char­ac­ter name                   <control>
Uni­co­de 1.0 char­act­er name (de­pre­ca­ted)  NEXT LINE (NEL)

https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl also included this information

HTML en­co­ding                            … &#x85;  hexa­decimal
                                         … &#133;  deci­mal

which gave me some vague hint, how it was possible, that … become ``. But this is not main problem here.

My question is: how is possible, that control character is shown up like this and what is the actual glyph used to represent it?

I tried to sketch into http://shapecatcher.com/ to identify it but without success. I did not find such a glyph in any Unicode table.

Solution

  • The alien symbol is not a Unicode character; but is in Microsoft's Webdings font, with character code 0x85. Running Start > Run > charmap, then selecting Webdings from the Font drop list, opens this window:

    webdings1

    If I click that alien character in the leftmost column, the message Character Code : 0x85 is shown at the bottom of the window.

    webdings2

    I can even copy that character from the Character Map and paste it into Microsoft Wordpad:

    webdings3

    The WebDings symbols were included in Unicode Release 7: Pictographic symbols (including many emoji), geometric symbols, arrows, and ornaments originating from the Wingdings and Webdings sets. Therefore you would expect the alien symbol to also be in Unicode. However, I don't think the version of Webdings that was used included that alien symbol, since Windows 10 also has a ttf file for Webdings (version 5.01), and it also does not include the alien symbol:

    webdings4

    So presumably what originally caught your attention was some text being rendered with an older version of the Webdings font which included that alien symbol.