&νβσπ;



  • For some reason I'm still on a bunch of mailing lists at my university even though I graduated last year. Today I got an email that had the following text:

    ...
    information sessions for students studying:
    •&νβσπ;Software & Web Development
    •&νβσπ;Information Systems
    •&νβσπ;Telecommunications & Networking
    ...

    Searching Google for &νβσπ; brings back 700 results. What is this strange series of characters and where does it come from?



  • Given it starts with & and ends with ;, It looks like some kind of psuedo-html control code that was mangled by character encodings or a badly written parser. Or both.



  • nbsp, perhaps?



  • Specifically, it's " " written in the font Symbol. (Or else the Unicode characters that look the same, like were used in the thread title.) Equivalently, it can be seen as " " with English letters replaced by their Greek phonetic equivalents.



  • @Daniel15 said:

    For some reason I'm still on a bunch of mailing lists at my university even though I graduated last year. Today I got an email that had the following text:

    ...
    information sessions for students studying:
    •&νβσπ;Software & Web Development
    •&νβσπ;Information Systems
    •&νβσπ;Telecommunications & Networking
    ...

    Searching Google for &νβσπ; brings back 700 results. What is this strange series of characters and where does it come from?

    Are you using Lotus Notes? I wonder if there is a Lotus Notes expert somewhere that could help...

    The Power Of Domino Compels You! The Power Of Domino Compels You! Yellow Dude, Come Out Of The Shadows!



  • @ais523 said:

    Specifically, it's " " written in the font Symbol. (Or else the Unicode characters that look the same, like were used in the thread title.) Equivalently, it can be seen as " " with English letters replaced by their Greek phonetic equivalents.

    You devil! You must be one of those sudoku people!



  • @ais523 said:

    Specifically, it's " " written in the font Symbol. (Or else the Unicode characters that look the same, like were used in the thread title.) Equivalently, it can be seen as " " with English letters replaced by their Greek phonetic equivalents.

    Assuming the original post was copy&paste, the later is more likely. Probably somebody forgot they had Greek keyboard when they typed in the HTML.



  • @Bulb said:

    Probably somebody forgot they had Greek keyboard when they typed in the HTML.

    More likely it's an MS Word to web-based CMS copy & paste operation that went south. Word's bulleted lists by default use the Symbol font for their bullets and include a non-breaking space after the bullets...



  • @Ragnax said:

    More likely it's an MS Word to web-based CMS copy & paste operation that went south.
    You'd think that, but then there's:


    and especially:




    Looks like sites that push everything through a "convert-to-locale-phonetics" filter, and then people copy&pasting from that.



    <п>this is a paragraph with a<бр />linebreak</п>





  • @ais523 said:

    More likely it's an MS Word to web-based CMS copy & paste operation that went south. Word's bulleted lists by default use the Symbol font for their bullets and include a non-breaking space after the bullets...

    Ah, I see. That's quite interesting.

    Are you using Lotus Notes?
    Nope - My university uses some Hotmail thing which I forward to my personal Google Apps account.

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