MS Notepad freaky thing!

number41 · 3 Dec 2006 at 14:38

Couldnt find this when searching so thought I'd post it...

Open notepad, type in "this app can break" WITHOUT the "" and save the file. Then try and reopen it!!

Why does it mess up? I'm confused :confused:

Duke · 3 Dec 2006 at 14:39

no idea

benneh · 3 Dec 2006 at 14:41

bit wierd

Glaucus · 3 Dec 2006 at 14:41

probably one of those hidden programmer things. there's other things like a simple shoot em up in excel and other crazy such things. Are they called ester eggs or something.

Mattus · 3 Dec 2006 at 14:41

Possibly an easter egg?

KizZ · 3 Dec 2006 at 14:42

Weird

R.O.S.S.I · 3 Dec 2006 at 14:42

how strange.

TripleT · 3 Dec 2006 at 14:43

Mattus said:
Possibly an easter egg?

What he said.

I love the one in Quark with the little alien for deleting things.

Al Vallario · 3 Dec 2006 at 14:44

...and here's why: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/03/24/95235.aspx

It's not an easter egg, just a fault in Notepad attempting to discern the encoding of the file due to it's size. It works with a number of strings.

*av

Spinal2k2 · 3 Dec 2006 at 14:44

AcidHell2 said:
probably one of those hidden programmer things. there's other things like a simple shoot em up in excel and other crazy such things. Are they called ester eggs or something.

agreed loads of programs have them in. easter eggs the usually call them (actualy a lot of dvd movies have them in aswell on the menu screens)

Vai · 3 Dec 2006 at 14:44

It isn't an easter egg, it happens with anything with that pattern of words, it is to do with the way notepad detects unicode documents or something.

Gilly · 3 Dec 2006 at 14:44

Its actually an encoding detection mechanism that doesn't work very well. It'd equate to chinese (?) symbols if you had the correct language packs installed. There's a few full explanations of it if you Google it.

number41 · 3 Dec 2006 at 14:54

Been looking at the easter eggs thing and it's interesting! Seems MS dont do it anymore however according to Wikipedia (the source of all knowledge!) due to MS being part of the Trustworthy Computing thingy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustworthy_Computing

UKTopGun · 3 Dec 2006 at 14:54

That's weird, 3 answers all posted at same time.

UKTopGun · 3 Dec 2006 at 14:55

Ooops double post *sorry*

DAVEM · 3 Dec 2006 at 14:57

number41 said:
Couldnt find this when searching so thought I'd post it...

Open notepad, type in "this app can break" WITHOUT the "" and save the file. Then try and reopen it!!

Why does it mess up? I'm confused

Awesome, going to confuse EVERYONE at work with that tomorrow!

David

GeForce · 3 Dec 2006 at 16:24

Very weird.

"this can app break", "this break app can", "this app acn break" and "this non non break" confuse it too.

But

"app can this break" doesn't.

Odd eh?

Jon

Tobes · 3 Dec 2006 at 16:26

type in "bush hid the facts"

Just another string that works

GeForce · 3 Dec 2006 at 16:28

Anything does that's this pattern:

WWWW XXX YYY ZZZZZ

Interesting

Paul2k12 · 3 Dec 2006 at 16:37

I've just tried this and typed in this app can break

It came up with chinese characters so i asked my chinese penpal to translate and she said it doesn't make any sense whatsoever,

Words like happy, wooden raft, flinch, knock. Totally random.

Paul