unicodenoncharacter

What's the purpose of the noncharacters U+FDD0 to U+FDEF?


U+FFFE needs to be a noncharacter in order to allow the Byte Order Mark to work.

U+FFFF is described in The Unicode Standard as "useful for internal purposes as sentinels". Makes sense.

But I can't figure out, and The Unicode Standard doesn't really explain, why the set of noncharacters includes some random block within "Arabic Presentation Forms-A". What are these for? (Besides the eye of the basilisk?)


Solution

  • OK the question is "what are they for" and "Why are they in the middle of the Arabic Presentation Forms".

    Therefore it was agreed that these codepoints, which were never going to be used otherwise, would be designated noncharacters so they could be used internally by applications/programmers.