Canโt seem to remove the formatting from a string of text?
Canโt seem to remove the formatting from a string of text? ๊ด๋ จ
I had a fella email me a line of text almost just like this:
๐๐๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ ๐๐ฅ๐๐ง๐๐จ๐ฌ, ๐๐จ๐ฌ๐ญ๐ ๐๐ข๐๐
He said he could not remove that formatting no matter what he did. It looks kinda bold, doesnโt it? And set into a serif font. Youโd think you could select it in the text editor youโre in and remove that formatting. He said he tried copy/pasting it into places where no text formatting is even allowed, like in VS Code or the URL bar of a browser. Voodoo, he said.
Hereโs the thing: that text isnโt formatted.
That first โCโ you see above isnโt a regular uppercase character C, our typical friend U+0043 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C, itโs โ๐โ, that is, U+1D402 : MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL C. Itโs literally a different character in Unicode. There areโฆ a lot of Unicode characters:
List of Unicode characters
As ofย Unicodeย version 16.0, there are 155,063ย charactersย withย code points, covering 168 modern and historicalย scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets.
It could be written like ๐ฎ๐๐๐๐ ๐ญ๐๐๐๐๐๐, ๐ฎ๐๐๐๐ ๐ฝ๐๐๐ instead, or ๐๐ฎ๐น๐น๐ฒ ๐๐น๐ฎ๐ป๐ฐ๐ผ๐, ๐๐ผ๐๐๐ฎ ๐ฅ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฎ.
Should you do this to get super sweet effects in places you otherwise couldnโt? Probably not. The accessibility is rough. Listen to the audio output in this blog post. ~If youโre going to do it on the web where you have HTML control, do something like:~
<!-- Don't do this! Leaving for posterity. -->
<span aria-label="Calle Blancos, Costa Rica">
<span aria-hidden="true">๐ฎ๐๐๐๐ ๐ญ๐๐๐๐๐๐, ๐ฎ๐๐๐๐ ๐ฝ๐๐๐</span>
</span>
Update
See Benโs comment on why not to do the above. Instead, make a visually hidden version that a screen reader would still see, and an ARIA hidden one that will be seen visually. (Noting potential concerns about copy/paste that started this whole article.)
<span class="visually-hidden">Calle Blancos, Costa Rica</span>
<span aria-hidden="true">๐ฎ๐๐๐๐ ๐ญ๐๐๐๐๐๐, ๐ฎ๐๐๐๐ ๐ฝ๐๐๐</span>