I assure you, it wasn't very interesting. :-) Headache-y, more like. The diacritic thing was completely inapplicable anyway, as all our text was plain English. I really don't want to get into what the thing was, because it sounds stupider the more I try to explain it. But it got the wheels spinning in my head, and now that I've been reading up a lot about Unicode and older standards like 2022/6429, it got me thinking whether there might already be an elegant solution.
But, as an example I'm making up right now, imagine you want to packetize a large string. The packets are not all equal sized, the sizes are determined by some algorithm. And the packet boundary may occur between a base char and a diacritic. You insert markers into the string at the packet boundaries. You can then store the string, copy it, display it, or pass it to the sending function which will scan the string and know to send the next packet when it reaches the marker. And you can now do all that without the need to pass around extra metadata (like a list of ints of where the packet boundaries are supposed to be) or to re-calculate the boundaries; it's still just a big string. If a different application sees the string, it will know to completely ignore the packet markers; it can even strip them out if it wants to (the canonical equivalent of the noop character is the absence of a character). As should be obvious, I'm not recommending this as good practice. From: Shawn Steele [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, June 22, 2019 19:57 To: Sławomir Osipiuk; [email protected] Subject: RE: Unicode "no-op" Character? + the list. For some reason the list's reply header is confusing. From: Shawn Steele Sent: Saturday, June 22, 2019 4:55 PM To: Sławomir Osipiuk <[email protected]> Subject: RE: Unicode "no-op" Character? The original comment about putting it between the base character and the combining diacritic seems peculiar. I'm having a hard time visualizing how that kind of markup could be interesting? From: Unicode <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Slawomir Osipiuk via Unicode Sent: Saturday, June 22, 2019 2:02 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Unicode "no-op" Character? I see there is no such character, which I pretty much expected after Google didn't help. The original problem I had was solved long ago but the recent article about watermarking reminded me of it, and my question was mostly out of curiosity. The task wasn't, strictly speaking, about "padding", but about marking - injecting "flag" characters at arbitrary points in a string without affecting the resulting visible text. I think we ended up using ESC, which is a dumb choice in retrospect, though the whole approach was a bit of a hack anyway and the process it was for isn't being used anymore.
