Viewing Non-Printable ASCII Characters

ASCII text can contain non-printable characters which will not be visible when you open a text file in NotePad. The non-printable characters include not only line feeds and carriage returns, but also characters such as those used to mark the end of text; end of transmission; tabs; and file separators.

To review these characters, enter the text in an advanced text editor such as NotePad ++.

Windows' Character Map

Don't miss that Windows includes an application called Character Map which you can use to look up the alt codes and unicodes of thousands of different characters. These codes can be used in any Windows application.

Click on the 'Advanced view' check box and a search box will appear. You can enter the name of any character or symbol that you want to search for.

At the bottom of the window you'll see references to the unicode and alt character codes. In Word you can simply type the unicode four character alphanumeric code and then press ALT + X and the code will appear. To enter the alt code, simply press down the ALT key and then press the numbers on your keyboard's number pad.

The characters can also be selected and copied. You can add multiple characters to your clipboard to form complete words in Hebrew, Arabic and other languages.

Getting Bates Numbers Right: Hyphens and Hyphen-minuses

Recently I received a PDF of list of Bates numbers that I had to look up in a Relativity workspace. I converted the PDF to an Excel spreadsheet using Adobe Acrobat, and copied the column containing the Bates numbers into the field for the document identifier in Relativity. Unexpectedly, the Bates numbers which contained hyphens did not come up in the search results. What went wrong?

One of the Bates numbers from the exhibit list that I couldn't find was composed of these characters [note: these are not real Bates numbers, but the hyphens are]:

XYZ‐000818

However, the Relativity workspace did contain a Bates number as a document identifier that was composed of these characters:

XYZ-000818

What's the difference? It's hard to see but the hyphen or dash between the letter prefix and the six digit number is different. See this analysis in Excel:

The IF . . . THEN formula shows the two Bates numbers are not actually the same. The UNICODE formula reveals that the two hyphens are actually distinct characters.

Unicode 45 is the hyphen-minus character used in cell B1. Unicode 8208 is a regular hyphen used in cell A1. These characters can be read differently by document review platforms and text editors.

Be sure to also account for en dashes – (unicode 8211 entered with ALT CODE 0150) and em dashes — (unicode 8212 entered with ALT CODE 0151).