Specials (Unicode Block)
Specials is the name of a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, 5 are assigned as of Unicode 6.0:
- U+FFF9 interlinear annotation anchor, marks start of annotated text
- U+FFFA interlinear annotation separator, marks start of annotating text
- U+FFFB interlinear annotation terminator, marks end of annotating text
- U+FFFC  object replacement character, placeholder in the text for another unspecified object, for example in a compound document.
- U+FFFD � replacement character used to replace an unknown or unprintable character
- U+FFFE
not a character. - U+FFFF
not a character.
FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the usual sense, but guaranteed not to be a Unicode character at all. They can be used to guess a text's encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by definition not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The U+FEFF is Unicode's byte-order mark, named "zero-width no-break space" (as inclusion of it in text shall not be noticed). If this character is read in the wrong byte order (for example, due to an endianness bug), it will read 0xFFFE, which is illegal Unicode.
Read more about Specials (Unicode Block): Replacement Character, Unicode Chart, See Also