ASCII definition of symbol

Question

I've spent hours with no luck on this. In terms of cmd prompt, what does the white filled in square with a 1 followed afterwards mean? e.g.

http://i1012.photobucket.com/albums/af249/dororoj/square1.jpg

I've tried using string.find() (using C++) with various hex symbols listed on the ascii table at:

http://web.cs.mun.ca/~michael/c/ascii-table.html

to no avail. Such a simple question yet I can't for the life of me figure it out! As for what I want to do, I simply want to be able to locate that square with the 1 afterwards in any string. Many thanks.

Answer 1

I'm not entirely sure but I would think it's one of the non-printing characters as per the link you gave.

If your system isn't beeping at you every time it tries to display that string that you can probably rule out the system bell character... ;)

Answer 2

od -c will let you see what that sequence is. Simply pipe the text into it.

Answer 3

I ran the following C# code bit and found the symbol you mentioned when the loop hit 166. So i doubt that it could mean anything useful.Although it doesnt mean anything it could've been used for primitive ASCII based display/drawing :)

namespace block
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            int j;
            for ( j = 0; j < 1000; j++)
            {
                Console.Write((char)j+" "+j +"\t");


            }
            Console.Read();
        }
    }
}

Answer 4

It's not an ASCII symbol. That's entirely possible. ASCII encodes only 127 out of 100.000+ characters. It looks your character could be Unicode, U+2588 "Full Block": █. But it's hard to see from a screenshot. There's a whole family of blocks similar to that, starting at U+2580 ▀ and running up to U+2590 ▐

(I haven't checked all 100.000; there could be more similar characters. E.g. U+53E3 口, a chinese character)