What are these strange characters?

I couldn't put them in the title because they actually seem to have many bytes:

I took some screenshots:

enter image description here

Rafael

Posted 2014-02-14T15:39:07.920

Reputation: 165

very strange characters, they seem to have lines shooting up the screen on my computer! http://i.imgur.com/AJ1ghBQ.png

– barlop – 2014-02-14T15:54:26.803

These characters prevent us from being able to edit your question. Can you post a screenshot of the characters instead? – Ramhound – 2014-02-14T16:29:16.760

@barlop | Not just yours ;) – Matthew Williams – 2014-02-14T16:29:20.073

1There's only about a dozen duplicates of this... gimme a minute. – Bob – 2014-02-14T16:34:09.480

Answers

This question is a duplicate of the question @Bob linked. To expand on the accepted answer to that question, Unicode supports stacking diacritics, so what you're actually seeing are a whole bunch of characters, but part of their definition is that they get stacked on top of the previous character.

Consider the Spanish character, Ñ. It is really an N with a ~ displayed above. While many combo characters are pre-made and available in Unicode (and even ANSI), Unicode supports making the many variations that non-Latin alphabets require.

Dane

Posted 2014-02-14T15:39:07.920

Reputation: 1 682

According to a Google search they are Thai. See here

Matthew Williams

Posted 2014-02-14T15:39:07.920

Reputation: 4 149

Yes, is the same character, but this Thai has just 1 byte per character. – Rafael – 2014-02-14T16:39:29.960