Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

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> Unit Separator is Control-_ (underscore) and Record Separator is Control-^ (caret), for instance.

And this is in fact how they show up in vim (or at least my fairly uncustomized vim), using ^ to stand for ctrl as was once conventional: `^_` and `^^`

The legacy MARC binary format still used for library data uses ascii 29, 30, and 31 -- although for reasons with probably some bizarre historical definition uses them DIFFERENTLY than defined in ascii.

0x1D == 29 == ascii group seperator == MARC Record separator

0x1E == 30 == ascii record seperator == MARC Field Terminator

0x1F == 31 == ascii unit separator == MARC subfield seperator

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARC_standards

Back in the day with a numeric keypad you could type Alt-(number) to get any ASCII character, but not sure if that still works. In Firefox apparently Alt-1 takes you to the first tab, Alt-2 second tab...

In most graphical *nix environments that I'm familiar with, if you hold Control and Shift¹ and type U, you can type any Unicode character by its (hex) code point. For instance, if you want an em dash, which is U+2014, hold Control and Shift, and type "U2014".

¹You can release Control and Shift after typing "U", in which case the character will appear after you type a space. Or, you can hold Control and Shift while typing the code point, in which case the character will appear after you release either modifier key.

I just tried in Debian, works! Very handy.

On Windows yes, just proceed the number with a 0 to get Unicode. See the "How to enter Unicode characters in Microsoft Windows" page [1] for more details, including one of my favorite tricks, using Alt-X in WordPad. It is especially useful when you want to know what the code point is for a Unicode character.

[1] http://www.fileformat.info/tip/microsoft/enter_unicode.htm

Turn on Num Lock and it still works, including in Firefox.

Alt-(3 digits)

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