[Tutor] why is unichr(sys.maxunicode) blank?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On 18/05/13 05:23, Albert-Jan Roskam wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was curious what the "high" four-byte ut8 unicode characters look like.

What typeface are you using to print them? Most type faces ("fonts") only support a tiny portion of the Unicode range. For that matter, most of the Unicode range is currently unused.


> Why does the snippet below not print anything (well, it will eventually, I think, but at that point I have lost my patience already). Puh-lease tell me there are no such things as Mongolian, Chinese backspaces and other nonprintable characters. ;-)

Chinese backspaces? Probably not. But there may well be unprintable characters for all sorts of reasons:

- the font you are using simply doesn't have a glyph for the code-point;

- the code-point is not yet assigned, so there's nothing to show;

- the code-point represents an invisible character, like IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE, or a zero-width character, like MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR;

- or it represents a non-printing control character;

- or a formatting mark like LEFT-TO-RIGHT EMBEDDING;

- or it is one of the sixty-six guaranteed "non-characters", such as the infamous byte-order marks U+FFFE and U+FFFF.




-- 
Steven