what kind of symbol is THIS??!! (1 Viewer)

[Patrick_L]

i replied to an email my friend sent to me and he got nothing but this: ÿ<
what the heck is it?? i have Microsoft Express 5.
thanks for any replies.
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Patrick

 

[Bill Slack]

It's a umlaut!
(that really is what it's called...)
If memory serves, it's NULL in some character set... which I suppose why it's all your friend got (e.g., nothing.)
As to why it happened? I haven't a clue.

 

[James Nguyen]

Or it could be the ASCII code for a character from a double byte language set. I.e. most Asiatic writing system.
For the roman letters and arabic numbers, only a single byte of ASCII is require to represent each character. In other writing systems where there's a much larger array of characters (i.e. Chinese approx 10,000 or so ideographs, Japanese 3 writing systems including several thousand ideographs, Korean with approx 30 characters used to formulate thousands of possible characters) it's impossible to symbolize a character with a single byte. So, they're all double byte, meaning two (often meaningless looking if you're not using a foreign character set) characters make up the single "letter".
Considering that's the only thing in the e-mail though, it was probably an error in transmission somehow

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Umlaut is ... the name for the diacritical symbol placed above a vowel to indicate a sound change in Germanic languages, as in the German Fräulein and the Swedish fröken

One possibility it that there was a tramsission problem. Another is that you sent the message in HTML, and your friend's e-mail program can only handle plain text. Try resending the message as text-only.
Regards,
Joe
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[Clinton McClure]

Looks like Prince changed his name again.

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Yes, but are they high-quality balloons? ~ David Letterman

 

[Cees Alons]

Joseph is right

The umlaut is the two dots above the letter

in fact, it represents the written-Gotic version of the letter "e" (raised).
And what your friend found in your mail, could be almost anything (from different character sets to part of an image file) - just some bytes taken as ASCII, while they actually weren't.
Cees

 

[Steven K]

Most likely it's a unicode character. IE and Outlook natively support unicode as opposed to MBCS.

 

[Henry Carmona]

Are yall crazy or sompin?
Thats a bird!
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"Charlie don't surf."
[Edited last by Henry Carmona on September 09, 2001 at 01:58 PM]

 

[James Nguyen]

Most likely it's a unicode character. IE and Outlook natively support unicode as opposed to MBCS.

NT/2000/XP support unicode throughout the OS, not just individual apps like IE/Outlook.
If memory serves me correctly, I believe Win9x did too.
Then again, I'm no ASCII/Unicode/MultiByte Character Set expert.