Can't paste "weird" Asian characters properly. Which should be the default document encoding?

Ohayo Gosaimas

Hello,

I occasionally have to deal with “weird” Asian characters, like the ones used in kaomojis.

Most of them load fine, but some of them… well, don’t.

For instance this one, if I copy-paste it into a notepad++ file, instead of

¯\_ʘ‿ʘ_/¯

the central character will have become a question mark in a rectangle.

And it’s a display problem: I can copy-paste it from notepad++ into internet pages (like right here) or into a simple Win-R’s “run” dialogue, the character will be displayed properly again. The original character is preserved, not destroyed.

Context, if necessary: Windows 10, with two locales on my computer, English and French, no Asian languages. Still, copy-pasting Japanese and Chinese works flawlessly, when needed.

I’m no alien to weird encoding manipulations (recently, I had an .sql file that required to Convert to ANSI and next Encode in UTF-8, to fix a weird Latin1 database import, it’s like magic at this point, it worked, but no idea why), so I suspect something with encoding could be the solution.

Which leads me to humbly ask: please, would you know if a notepad++ file “should” definitely have a particular encoding rather than another?

I mean, I’d have said UTF-8 without BOM, no questions asked, but I can’t paste the emoji I mentioned in there without having it transformed, so maybe it’s got to be something else.

Or - odd possibility, but who knows - maybe it’s officially that there are characters that simply cannot be properly displayed in Notepad++?

Thanks if you have a possible explanation in mind, and have a good confinement day! :D

Alan Kilborn

@Ohayo-Gosaimas

Which should be the default document encoding?

This is something you have to answer for yourself.

maybe it’s officially that there are characters that simply cannot be properly displayed in Notepad++?

It’s all about the font.

You probably want to have a read here: https://community.notepad-plus-plus.org/topic/16497/missing-unicode-characters-in-notepad

Ohayo Gosaimas

Oh, damn it, I didn’t even suspect it might simply be a font problem.

Maybe because of my messy latin1 database import problem, in which it wasn’t a font issue. I feel silly now.

Well, I’m off to experimenting with other fonts now.

But… a pity, really, there’s no better than Inconsolata, in my biased eyes.

Thank you Alan!