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Comment by sir_eliah | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad you asked! Obviously you have to check the code table and you can see that's a Greek beta, not German Eszett. \s

  In [1]: ord("β")
  Out[1]: 946

  In [2]: ord("ß")
  Out[2]: 223

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I come to Hacker News for exactly this. Excellent nerdsnipe.

As if you could not tell by the shape of the glyph.

you can tell by the way it is

This is why your multi-language OCR solution doesn‘t work.

Come on now. I would swear both characters are the same. I didn't know that the German one wasn't a Greek beta.

The little tail is the distinction

It's not, actually. The actual difference is that beta is a form of B, while Eszett is two letters s (a long one and a short one) joined together and drawn with a single stroke. Alternatively, a letter s and a letter z (hence the name Eszett).

You gave the history of it

But the context of the question is how a system like a human can make a visual distinction quickly via a characteristic

The characteristic I gave was the little tail which is independent of knowing the derivative of how it got its tail

Right? Without knowing (I don't speak German) one can asume that the tail it's just a typographic feature.

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