[caret question]

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 07:35:51AM -0500, GDHough wrote:
> On Sunday 04 January 2004 14:25, Marcus Brubaker wrote:
> > Basically, all of those programs are generally designed to deal with
> > standard ASCII text.  When they run in to undisplayable characters (such
> > as 0x7F) how they get shown is up to the program.  Things like gedit and
> > kmail will give some kind of icon which represents an undisplayable
> > character.  vi and pico, being traditionally text based, show it in a
> > different manner.
> >
> So this is normally how unicode is handled by different applications? 
> Unpredictably?

No, it is handled predictably by unicode aware applications, which is
bascially not most of them.  I think vim can do unicode given the right
terminal environment and such.  ':help utf' at least mentions it in vim
6.x.

> It peaked my curiosity when I was studying some SHELLCODE x86 unicode NOOP 
> alerts from snort. The same packets viewed with ACID (using Galeon) show the 
> caret_questionmark as a blank. About all I learned googleing was there is a 
> strange language called INTERCAL...
> 
> If five different text viewers display five different things, which one is 
> telling the truth? My inclination is to stick with vi. But then I am still 
> wondering if since this causes unpredictable behavior in x86, is it something 
> to be concerned with?

Well unicode is NOT ascii, so any ascii application can do (or not do)
whatever it wants when it sees anything that isn't ascii.

Lennart Sorensen
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