Notepad bug? Encoding issue?
Someone showed me a weird text file today. It was a bat file
with 'copy MeYou.bak MeYou.txt'. When you would ran it, it
would work. But when you opened it in Notepad, there was
nothing.
So we decided to look a bit into this
and here is something we came up with to 'create' invisible
text:
Open notepad and enter:
'
abc.bak abc.txt'
(That is:
space abc dot bak space abc dot txt, no line break,
without the quotes)
It doesn't work with every
string, just follow us on this example and use that one.
Save your file. Notepad picks default
ANSI as encoding.
Open your
file, Notepad seems to open by default in
Unicode encoding.
Your text is
now invisible. 
Does anyone know why the saving default is
different from the opening default?
And why does
it happen to that particular piece of text. It doesnt happen
to ' b.b b.b' or ' .bak .txt'.
It
looks the same when viewing it through a hex editor.
But apparently it has to do something with encoding.
Anyone who can explain?
Update: When you paste it in IE or Trillian you get '????????',
like some people tried in the comments ;)
Update2: In my notepad screenshot the font was Terminal, when I
choose Verdana it are indeed squares. Not that invisible
anymore, but still wrong :)
Update3: You can find an explanation on why this is happening at
The Old New Thing.