Funny: How to Break Windows Notepad

It's not a bug! It's unintended irony!

Published on May 18, 2006 By Zoomba In Windows Software

Here's a really funny way to break Notepad that a coworker showed me this morning. I bet this is one of those jokes that's been around for ages, but this was the first I ever heard of it, so it's new to me.

This actually works. It will not crash your computer, it just breaks Notepad in that it causes it to display very oddly. No perm damage comes of the following steps.

Here's how to do it:
1. Open up Notepad (not Wordpad, not Word or any other word processor)
2. Type in this sentence exactly (without quotes): "this app can break"
3. Save the file to your hard drive.
4. Close Notepad
5. Open the saved file by double clicking it.

Instead of seeing your sentence, you should see a series of squares. For whatever reason, Notepad can't figure out what to do with that series of characters and breaks

Again, it doesn't crash the app or anything, it's just a funny little twise of fate/unintended feature

Comments (Page 3)

kulman

on Jun 21, 2006

My observations on this bug.
1) Its happens only when entered for first time after we open the notepad program.
2) when it is saved in any other encoding format other than ANSI, it wont happen.
3) It is happening only when the first 18 characters are 4letter word(space) followed by 2 three letter words(space in between) and then a five letter word.Including digits its happening. above this if the total characters are even, its happening.
4)If the phrase contains any Upper case letters in between other than 1st and last character, it wont happen again.
Though I could hear the reason as "
1) You are saving to 8-bit Extended ASCII (Look at the Save As / Encoding format)

2) You are reading as 16-bit UNICODE (You guessed it, look at the Save As / Encoding format)

This is why the 18 8-bit characters are being displayed as 9 (obviously not supported by your codepage) 16-bit UNICODE characters"
I would like to conclude that why it is happening for short peice of text?
2)If we erase the Junk characters and re type phrase "Bush hid the facts" or "aaaa aaa aaa aaaaa" or "1111 111 111 1111" , it is appearing fine.

The reason what I would hear for this is "Text files containing UTF-16 is supposed to start with a BOM, so you can read those two chars and the application will know it is UTF-16. But so many applications does not do that (you have probably noticed the two small chars Notepad adds to the start of a file sometimes),

So what should a poor Notepad do? Well, it can alwys use the IsTextUnicode() Win32 API. YOu pass it some text, and it tries to guess if it is Unicode or not. But what if you just give it so little text, and maybe even just lowercase? Well, then it isn't too easy to tell if it really was unicode or not you gave it. And in these small strings you guys have found, it yes indeed does break. Poor Notepad gets the blame for a bad API, and other faulty apps.."
more interesting links
http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/06/14/631016.aspx

GreenReaper

on Jun 22, 2006

Here is another explanation of this, which I happened to read after reading this here: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/06/14/630864.aspx

LadyJinx

on Jul 17, 2006

Didn't work for me...

Je$$e

on Jul 19, 2006

not work!!

Tominated

on Jul 20, 2006

pc world (in oz) did a section about it in the back of the magazine this month. apparantly "pies are the shizz" does not work.

DesignCaddy

on Jul 22, 2006

thoreaulylazy just completely killed the ride

thanks, guys, i found this post thoroughly amusing

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