µpost: Pound signs and terminal control sequences
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This afternoon I was XORing some data together, as you do, and I noticed there were pound symbols among the random characters.
This wouldn’t be normally so odd, but I knew that my data should contain only ASCII characters and XORing ASCII characters together should only produce more ASCII characters, right?
A detailed description of me losing my mind
I first started checking my input to see if it really was pure ASCII. I tried to look for no-break-spaces and other fancy whitespace, but to no avail. Then I looked through my code, what if converting from characters to signed integers caused some weird inconsistencies when XORing? Nope, not that either. I tried printing out all the different unique char codes that were in the output and surely enough, all of them were 0-127. At this point I was desperate and thought to myself: “What if the pound sign actually is in ASCII and I’ve just never noticed it?” I copied the symbol over into a python shell with ord("£") and sure enough, I got 163 out, which is clearly larger than 127, so, obviously out of range of ASCII.
Well, turns out that, because the “terminals” or terminal emulators of today use essentially the same protocol as actual terminals, there are some left overs that don’t have much use these days. There are escape codes for things raging from colour, which most of us use, through blinking text, to National Replacement Character Sets – escape codes, which make your terminal replace certain ASCII characters with different ones, for instance the hash sign (#) with the pound sign (£).
The escape sequence in particular is ESC ( A and sure enough: