h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

And if it isn't, then what is it instead?

The reason I'm wondering is because I read on a gaming forum that inserting a space into your login name should make it unreadable for keylogging devices.

And it's not on any of the Windows Character Maps.

I have it in my head... but no 'proof' of such that its either character 32 or character 10 I've no idea why I have thi snotion in my head Hang on

In ASCII it would seem to be 32... I'm kind of chuffed at how geeky I was to kinda remember that... and now I'm thinking maybe 10 was a differnt* kind of space... or an 'enter' or page break type space, but I coudln't find anything on that...

32 is the ASCII code for a space (20 in hexadecimal) - see http://www.motionnet.com/cgi-bin/search.exe?a=showlink&no=65

So I suppose that means it must count as a character..?

Thanks 2legs and Danny B!

So do you think there's any truth in the statement that keyloggers can't pick up space when used within a login name?

chr(10) is a line feed character, used as (under) (or part) the end of line marker. Return is chr(13).

As to whether space is a character, well, that depends on the framework. I mean in printed or written documents I'd say it isn't, it is lack of a character. Otherwise a blank piece of paper would be considered full of text, which it isn't. Like a vacuum isn't a something, it is a lack of something (well, anything actually).

On a computer display however every screen text position has to have a value and if there is blank space then that value is 32 so it is a character it just doesn't have any pigmented pixels.
There's also chr(160) from extended ascii which is a hard space. That is 'even more' of a character than the normal space since it doesn't get concatenated or used as a line split.

"So do you think there's any truth in the statement that keyloggers can't pick up space when used within a login name?"

Depends on the actual keylogger - but in general programming terms, no. Doesn't make a blind bit of difference.

Thanks Icty!

Nahh, you're all wrong, Space is the final frontier

just wondering - anyone recall the method for inserting ascii characters into posts? Thought it was just &#160 or whatever but doesn't seem to work.

A978636

This one's a little more helpful, I find.

A1098876

á ah yes, press alt then type the number using the numberpad - I remember now - cheers!

And if you're on a laptop without a numeric keypad you can just copy and paste.

On my keyboard you get the accented characters á é í ó ú by holding down Ctrl and Alt, then typing the vowels. It doesn't work for y though.

In HTML, there are several 'spaces'

  ==> a non-breaking space (typically implemented by noobs using so-called WYSIWGs - aka WYSIWTFs)
  ==> a space the width of one en (the letter n)
  ==> a space the width of one em (the letter m) - ems are used in CSS for 'relative' (cf absolute) padding and margins

And... if that ain't too geeky, check out Whitespace - http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/

Although it was released on 01 April 2003, it's a 'real' programming language - with its own 'Hello World': http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/name.ws

>>>check out Whitespace

I've been doing this recently in java, (we were writing a program that encrypts strings)

Unfortunately, not much point in me saying the same as everyone else