How do I figure out what this character is?

Answer 1

Your screenshot is tiny, but does the Firefox sample contain a glyph with 4 hexadecimal characters in it? If so, that's the Unicode character's code number. You could also hunt for that diamond glyph on the Unicode code charts, or simply copy the diamond into a Google search and the character name should turn up near the top.

But the real question is how to handle Unicode input in your program. You need to do that correctly if you're processing XML. Nokogiri is a Ruby library? I'm surprised to hear it doesn't handle Unicode automatically.

Answer 2

Simply open the file using a hexeditor like xvi32.

Answer 3

I would save the page in Firefox to a file, and pass it to hexdump -C. Look for the fragment of HTML around it in the ASCII part, then look for the hex bytes. Most likely, these are UTF-8, so expect a multi-byte code.

Answer 4

Open the file hexeditor and extract the hexadecimal representation of the character. Then look up the code on on http://unicode.org to find out the name of the character.

Answer 5

hexdump -c from the Terminal command line will show you the character code.

Answer 6

Save file and then from the terminal use:

od ( octal dump )

Answer 7

Copy it into emacs and start hexl-mode.

Answer 8

If you're using Vim, then move the cursor over the character and type ga to show the hex in the status area

Answer 9

The search term you are looking for is U+2603 or U2603, obviously substituting the numbers from your lamentably blurry "unknown glyph" box. The first several results will be about that Unicode character.