Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow

Questions tagged [special-characters]

Special characters (as they apply to programming) are language-specific reserved characters or symbols used to accomplish a specific task (e.g. wildcard characters, data type indicators, escape characters, etc).

Every character is special in its own way. When talking about "special characters" in a question, be specific. Do you mean ASCII symbols, Japanese kana, or Egyptian hieroglyphs?

For example, when working with Unicode, characters from exotic scripts aren't more "special", technically, than characters from the ASCII range. If you mean characters that you can't enter directly with an US PC keyboard, you should probably use the term "non-ASCII characters" and avoid this tag.

5011 questions
76
votes
2 answers

What is the difference between iconv() and mb_convert_encoding() in PHP?

What's the difference between iconv() and mb_convert_encoding() in PHP? Does one perform better, faster, etc. ( eg. with specific encodings )? In what situations would one be preferred over the other? Here's what I think I know…
T. Brian Jones
  • 13,002
  • 25
  • 78
  • 117
71
votes
4 answers

Bigger version of •

Is there a bigger version of •? • Right now it is this big I want it this big without using font sizes or
    • 700 Software
    • 85,281
    • 83
    • 234
    • 341
    70
    votes
    2 answers

    Looking for special characters in Google

    Do you know how to look for special characters with google...? I'm looking at bash code and there's the ## operator. I would like to know what It does but I wasn't able to figure out a way to protect the character (I'm not sure it's even…
    LB40
    • 12,041
    • 17
    • 72
    • 107
    70
    votes
    9 answers

    What is the first character in the sort order used by Windows Explorer?

    For example, in a Windows folder, if we create some files and name them 1.html, 2.txt, 3.txt, photo.jpg, zen.png the order will be as is. But if we create another file with the name _file.doc it will be placed at the top. (considering we sort by…
    shxfee
    • 5,188
    • 6
    • 31
    • 29
    67
    votes
    5 answers

    WebClient.DownloadString() returns string with peculiar characters

    I have an issue with some content that we are downloading from the web for a screen scraping tool that I am building. in the code below, the string returned from the web client download string method returns some odd characters for the source…
    gbro3n
    • 6,729
    • 9
    • 59
    • 100
    66
    votes
    6 answers

    li:before{ content: "■"; } How to Encode this Special Character as a Bullit in an Email Stationery?

    After proudly coloring my liststyle bullet without any image url or span tags, via: ul{ list-style: none; padding:0; margin:0; } li{ padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em; } li:before { content: "■"; padding-right:7px; } Although these…
    Sam
    • 15,254
    • 25
    • 90
    • 145
    64
    votes
    7 answers

    What's the difference between \n and \r\n?

    They both mean "new line" but when is one used over the other?
    Emanuil Rusev
    • 34,563
    • 55
    • 137
    • 201
    62
    votes
    8 answers

    Represent space and tab in XML tag?

    How can space and tab be represented in an XML tag? Are there any special characters that can represent them?
    balaweblog
    • 14,982
    • 28
    • 73
    • 95
    61
    votes
    7 answers

    Matching special characters and letters in regex

    I am trying to validate a string, that should contain letters numbers and special characters &-._ only. For that I tried with a regular expression. var pattern = /[a-zA-Z0-9&_\.-]/ var qry = 'abc&*'; if(qry.match(pattern)) { …
    Quicksilver
    • 2,546
    • 3
    • 23
    • 37
    59
    votes
    5 answers

    How to detect line breaks in a text area input?

    What is the best way to check the text area value for line breaks and then calculate the number of occurrences, if any? I have a text area on a form on my webpage. I am using JavaScript to grab the value of the text area and then checking its…
    Dave Haigh
    • 4,369
    • 5
    • 34
    • 56
    56
    votes
    4 answers

    Replace Both Double and Single Quotes in Javascript String

    I am pulling in some information from a database that contains dimensions with both ' and " to denote feet and inches. Those characters being in my string cause me problems later and I need to replace all of the single and double quotes. I can…
    jmease
    • 2,507
    • 5
    • 49
    • 89
    55
    votes
    3 answers

    How to use jq when the variable has reserved characters?

    I'm trying to get the following to work and it's not, help me please: curl -s 'https://cryptofresh.com/api/asset/markets?asset=MKR' | jq .OPEN.BTC The variable in question includes a period, I tried just about everything to escape the period &&…
    Jonny Gerold
    • 551
    • 1
    • 4
    • 3
    53
    votes
    7 answers

    Deleting all special characters from a string - ruby

    I was doing the challenges from pythonchallenge writing code in ruby, specifically this one. It contains a really long string in page source with special characters. I was trying to find a way to delete them/check for the alphabetical chars. I…
    kwoskowicz
    • 537
    • 1
    • 5
    • 10
    52
    votes
    1 answer

    How to escape literal percent sign when NO_BACKSLASH_ESCAPES option is enabled?

    My company runs MySQL in NO_BACKSLASH_ESCAPES mode. How can I escape a literal % or _ in a LIKE query in this mode? The standard way is \%, but that doesn't work in this mode. Example: a column has the following values: 5% off, 50% off. The…
    Kip
    • 107,154
    • 87
    • 232
    • 265
    51
    votes
    5 answers

    NSURL URLWithString: is null with non-english accented characters

    I have the following string... NSString *googleSearchString = @"http://www.google.com/search?q=lyrics+%22Tænder+På+Dig%22+%22Jakob+Sveistrup%22"; Notice that it has some accented characters. When I try to turn that into a url the returned url is…
    regulus6633
    • 18,848
    • 5
    • 41
    • 49
    1 2
    3
    …
    99 100