Weird Notepad behavior, you must see this?

Question

Open notepad program in windows XP, type "iran win via atoms"
save it in a file, close notepad, open it again, load the file,
see what happens.... anybody can explain this?

Answer 1

This is a character format interpretation bug in Notepad.

It happens not just with "iran win via atoms", but with any string which has the pattern:

4 characters (space) 3 characters (space) 3 characters (space) 5 characters

Eg.:
iran win via atoms
bush hid the facts

The notepad stores files as byte streams. When opening a file, notepad tries to understand whether the stream represents Unicode characters. If it finds that the byte stream doesn't represent Unicode characters, it interprets the content as ASCII characters.

In "iran win via atoms" case, Notepad (due to a bug) interprets the byte stream as Unicode and tries to display the text as Unicode (instead of ASCII). If the corresponding Unicode language is not installed on your PC, blank characters or square boxes are displayed instead.

If you open the file in some other editor (say Wordpad), you will see the original string.

This will also happen with strings having pattern:
2 characters + (space) + 3 characters + (space) + 3 characters.

Eg.:
aa aaa aaa
zz zzz zzz


I hate Microsoft Notepad. I use SciTE instead. It's free and open-source and offers syntax highlighting for many languages, apart from great features:
http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/SciTEDownload.html

Answer 2

Nothing happened, it just read back what I typed.

Answer 3

thas cool