Home: go to the homepage U+FFF0 to U+FFFF Specials
Glyph for U+FFFC
Source: Noto Sans

U+FFFC Object Replacement Character

U+FFFC was added to Unicode in version 2.1 (1998). It belongs to the block U+FFF0 to U+FFFF Specials in the U+0000 to U+FFFF Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Other Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script.

The glyph is not a composition. It has a Neutral East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Other Neutral and is not mirrored. In text U+FFFC behaves as Contingent Break Opportunity regarding line breaks. It has type Other for sentence and Other for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Object Replacement Character is used as placeholder in situations, where some object should sit, that cannot be represented in plain text. For example, if you copy a text snippet with an embedded image from a web page to a text editor like Notepad or Vim, the clipboard might choose to replace the image with U+FFFC in the text content.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

Specials is a short Unicode block of characters allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 code points, five have been assigned since Unicode 3.0:

  • U+FFF9 INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION ANCHOR, marks start of annotated text
  • U+FFFA INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION SEPARATOR, marks start of annotating character(s)
  • U+FFFB INTERLINEAR ANNOTATION TERMINATOR, marks end of annotation block
  • 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, unrecognised, or unrepresentable character
  • U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character.
  • U+FFFF <noncharacter-FFFF> not a character.

U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> and U+FFFF <noncharacter-FFFF> are noncharacters, meaning they are reserved but do not cause ill-formed Unicode text. Versions of the Unicode standard from 3.1.0 to 6.3.0 claimed that these characters should never be interchanged, leading some applications to use them to guess text encoding by interpreting the presence of either as a sign that the text is not Unicode. However, Corrigendum #9 later specified that noncharacters are not illegal and so this method of checking text encoding is incorrect.

Unicode's U+FEFF BYTE ORDER MARK character can be inserted at the beginning of a Unicode text to signal its endianness: a program reading such a text and encountering 0xFFFE would then know that it should switch the byte order for all the following characters.

Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Special.

Representations

System Representation
65532
UTF-8 EF BF BC
UTF-16 FF FC
UTF-32 00 00 FF FC
URL-Quoted %EF%BF%BC
HTML hex reference &#xFFFC;
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake 

Elsewhere

Complete Record

Property Value
Age 2.1 (1998)
Unicode Name OBJECT REPLACEMENT CHARACTER
Unicode 1 Name
Block Specials
General Category Other Symbol
Script Common
Bidirectional Category Other Neutral
Combining Class Not Reordered
Decomposition Type None
Decomposition Mapping Glyph for U+FFFC Object Replacement Character
Lowercase
Simple Lowercase Mapping Glyph for U+FFFC Object Replacement Character
Lowercase Mapping Glyph for U+FFFC Object Replacement Character
Uppercase
Simple Uppercase Mapping Glyph for U+FFFC Object Replacement Character
Uppercase Mapping Glyph for U+FFFC Object Replacement Character
Simple Titlecase Mapping Glyph for U+FFFC Object Replacement Character
Titlecase Mapping Glyph for U+FFFC Object Replacement Character
Case Folding Glyph for U+FFFC Object Replacement Character
ASCII Hex Digit
Alphabetic
Bidi Control
Bidi Mirrored
Composition Exclusion
Case Ignorable
Changes When Casefolded
Changes When Casemapped
Changes When NFKC Casefolded
Changes When Lowercased
Changes When Titlecased
Changes When Uppercased
Cased
Full Composition Exclusion
Default Ignorable Code Point
Dash
Deprecated
Diacritic
Emoji Modifier Base
Emoji Component
Emoji Modifier
Emoji Presentation
Emoji
Extender
Extended Pictographic
FC NFKC Closure Glyph for U+FFFC Object Replacement Character
Grapheme Cluster Break Any
Grapheme Base
Grapheme Extend
Grapheme Link
Hex Digit
Hyphen
ID Continue
ID Start
IDS Binary Operator
IDS Trinary Operator and
IDSU 0
ID_Compat_Math_Continue 0
ID_Compat_Math_Start 0
Ideographic
InCB None
Indic Mantra Category
Indic Positional Category NA
Indic Syllabic Category Other
Jamo Short Name
Join Control
Logical Order Exception
Math
Noncharacter Code Point
NFC Quick Check Yes
NFD Quick Check Yes
NFKC Casefold Glyph for U+FFFC Object Replacement Character
NFKC Quick Check Yes
NFKC_SCF Glyph for U+FFFC Object Replacement Character
NFKD Quick Check Yes
Other Alphabetic
Other Default Ignorable Code Point
Other Grapheme Extend
Other ID Continue
Other ID Start
Other Lowercase
Other Math
Other Uppercase
Prepended Concatenation Mark
Pattern Syntax
Pattern White Space
Quotation Mark
Regional Indicator
Radical
Sentence Break Other
Soft Dotted
Sentence Terminal
Terminal Punctuation
Unified Ideograph
Variation Selector
Word Break Other
White Space
XID Continue
XID Start
Expands On NFC
Expands On NFD
Expands On NFKC
Expands On NFKD
Bidi Paired Bracket Glyph for U+FFFC Object Replacement Character
Bidi Paired Bracket Type None
East Asian Width Neutral
Hangul Syllable Type Not Applicable
ISO 10646 Comment
Joining Group No_Joining_Group
Joining Type Non Joining
Line Break Contingent Break Opportunity
Numeric Type None
Numeric Value not a number
Simple Case Folding Glyph for U+FFFC Object Replacement Character
Script Extension
Vertical Orientation U