U+FFFC Object Replacement Character
U+FFFC was added in Unicode version 2.1 in 1998. It belongs to the block Specials in the 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 no designated width in East Asian texts. In bidirectional text it acts as Other Neutral. When changing direction it is not mirrored. Depending on the context U+FFFC offers a line break opportunity at its position.
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. An example of an internal usage of U+FFFE is the CLDR algorithm; this extended Unicode algorithm maps the noncharacter to a minimal, unique primary weight.
Unicode's U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE 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 |
|---|---|
| Nº | 65532 |
| UTF-8 | EF BF BC |
| UTF-16 | FF FC |
| UTF-32 | 00 00 FF FC |
| URL-Quoted | %EF%BF%BC |
| HTML hex reference |  |
| Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake |  |
| Encoding: GB18030 (hex bytes) | 84 31 A4 36 |
Elsewhere
Complete Record
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| 2.1 (1998) | |
| OBJECT REPLACEMENT CHARACTER | |
| — | |
| Specials | |
| Other Symbol | |
| Common | |
| Other Neutral | |
| Not Reordered | |
| none | |
| Object Replacement Character | |
| ✘ | |
| Object Replacement Character | |
| Object Replacement Character | |
| ✘ | |
| Object Replacement Character | |
| Object Replacement Character | |
| Object Replacement Character | |
| Object Replacement Character | |
| Object Replacement Character | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Object Replacement Character | |
| Any | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| 0 | |
| 0 | |
| 0 | |
| ✘ | |
| None | |
| — | |
| NA | |
| Other | |
| — | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Yes | |
| Yes | |
| Object Replacement Character | |
| Yes | |
| Object Replacement Character | |
| Yes | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Other | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Other | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Object Replacement Character | |
| None | |
| neutral | |
| Not Applicable | |
| — | |
| No_Joining_Group | |
| Non Joining | |
| Contingent Break Opportunity | |
| none | |
| not a number | |
| Object Replacement Character | |
| U |