CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythoncharacter
Mishap
Mishap

Reputation: 283

'2' character with star inside?

Edit: Determined so far: It's not the 2, it's a character before the two, hex value BF, causing the star in the following character (which happens to be 2)

I'm running an elastic-mapreduce job using python scripts I have written, and I'm getting some weird output in the form of unexpected lines. I have noticed a pattern, however. The expected lines all have unexpected '2's in the form of characters with small stars just inside the top curve of the character. That is, when I open the file in Notepad++ (but not Notepad or Word) I see some twos show up like this (excuse the links, I am unable to embed images at less than 10 rep):

In text: https://i.sstatic.net/KaVyb.png
Zoomed in: https://i.sstatic.net/rPCrV.png

The weird '2's also show up when I run the python scripts on my own machine (though the unexpected lines do not). Does anyone know what might be causing this? It might shed some light on the odd extra lines of output I'm getting. I'm also just genuinely curious.

Also, I thought it might have had to do with encoding/decoding I was doing to parse safe URLs, but when I took out those parts the weird '2's remained, so it wasn't that.

Thanks

Upvotes: 2

Views: 114

Answers (1)

Floris
Floris

Reputation: 46365

You have EF BB BF in there... that's the UTF-8 encoding of the BOM mark: byte order mark. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark . I suspect that the star in the letter is your editor's way of signifying "I just got a BOM". See this earlier question . It seems to be a well known "thing", and that thread has some suggestions for dealing with it.

Upvotes: 2

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