What are these mystery characters

Question

This might not be a programming question, but I could not find any answer for it on Google.

I have some text mining task and doing data cleaning at the moment. I have come across some mystery characters far to often which are not in readable format.

These characters are: &#x003b2 , &#x00025 and so on.

All of these starts with a specific pattern and hence I believe they represent some encoding which is not readable to Excel.

Is there any way to convert them? I need to know what exactly these characters mean in order to know if I should remove them or not.

I googled those codes and google told me what they were.... ? Did you try actually googling the codes? — user1231232141214124, Nov 23 '15 at 17:49
I think it's kind of encoding. What is the relationship between data mining task and the Excel? Bit unclear what you try to do. — Madura Pradeep, Nov 23 '15 at 17:20

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 23 '15 at 17:18

3

Those are probably Unicode characters written as HTML entities in hexadecimal format.

&#x003b2 is the "GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA" (β).
&#x00025 is the "PERCENT SIGN" (%).

answered Nov 23 '15 at 17:18

Tunaki

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I am not sure about Unicode ,but the percent sign and beta character makes perfect sense in my data since these characters are always after some numbers. – Keval Shah Nov 23 '15 at 17:53

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 23 '15 at 17:17

2

They look like formatted hexadecimal values (possibly unicode if you're working with characters). You may know them as 0x003B2 and 0x00025, or many many other ways.

answered Nov 23 '15 at 17:17

Kayaman

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What are these mystery characters

2 Answers2