Hidden, but nonetheless present character needed? Dunno if this will work but it was a favorite of mine back in the DOS days.
ASCII character 255 is an invisible non-space character. It shouldn't get truncated. Actually, all the characters I'm typing now are ASCII characters. But some (the upper 128, or "Extended characters" because they use 8 bits instead of 7), don't have keys on the keyboard.
No worries. You can still type them by holding down Alt and typing their number on your numeric keypad.
The line below is an ASCII 255, which I hope doesn't get rendered weird by the browser/webserver/database/webserver/browser transitions.
See if you can highlight it. You couldn't if it's a space because the browser would truncate it.
The modern equivalent is the non-breaking space (or "hard space"), which we use all the time if we want more than one space without the browser truncating it, but I doubt it'll work. I'll try one on the next line.
It probably typed out the characters.
Anyway, doing the Alt-255 should work. It looks like a space but really isn't one. It's more like a full-sized character that's just not visible. But is treated as if it were. Keep in mind you have to use the NUMERIC keypad (with NumLock on) for this to work. It doesn't work if you use the numbers at the top of the keyboard.
Other fun with ASCII: You can use Extended ASCII characters (I did it all the time in the BBS days) to make boxes and even make them 3D-looking.
Just tried to make a 3D box, but apparently Windoze or Internet Explorer intercepts a lot of extended ASCII characters and translates them into something else. Doesn't seem to with 255, though.
Edit: Odd. The was typed out in preview (& nbsp ; without the spaces in case it doesn't display here either) but when I came back to edit, it was a hard-space.
asciitable.com gives all the ASCII characters.
Edit 2: The non-breaking space we use nowadays apparently becomes a true non-breaking space (as opposed to the characters used to create it) during normal HTML encoding/decoding.
To make cutting and pasting of the ASCII 255 easier, you can cut/paste what's between the minuses below.
1 of them: - -
2 of them: - -
3 of them: - -
4 of them: - -
Edit 3: Might be more difficult since a spreadsheet is involved. I'm using Excel 2007 at home, and it turns out to be using ANSI or Unicode rather than ASCII. In that case, you might try putting an unused ANSI character in the cell, like typing =CHAR(144). |
