Bush hid the facts is the common name for a bug present in all versions of Microsoft Notepad in Windows 2000 and Windows XP, which misinterpret a file in Windows-1252 or similar encoding such as UTF-16.
While "Bush hid the facts" is the sentence that is most commonly presented on the Internet, it does not exclusively occur with that phrase. The bug can be triggered by many sentences, including those that follow a particular structure: first word with even number of letters (4 or more) and all other worlds with odd number of letters. E.g. first word with 4 letters, two or more words with 3 letters, one word with 5 letters. Some phrases that will trigger this oddity are: "Bill can not dance", "John has the parts", "Iraq can own bases", "This app can break", "Feel the new power" or even longer phrases like "Einstein's thought regarding mathematics motivated Dhilung Kirat thinkin mathematics wonderfully amazing languagez".
The bug occurs when such a string is entered into Notepad (with no other characters) and then saved as a text file. Upon reloading the file into Notepad, the text will be replaced with nine Chinese characters, or squares if the language pack has not been installed. To retrieve the original text, bring up the "Open a file" dialog box, select the file, select "ANSI" in the "Encoding" list box, and click Open.
Discovery
The bug appeared for the first time in Windows 2000 but was not discovered immediately. It was discovered in early 2004 [1] and has since risen in popularity on the Internet.citation needed
This bug occurs when a file contains only a string of exactly the same format. The string must contain printable characters in groups of 4, 3, 3 and 5 with a single white-space (space or tab) character delimiting the groups. There must be no trailing whitespace or newline characters. The file must be exactly 18 characters long. Though these conditions are necessary, they are not sufficient: for example, the string "busx hix thx factx" displays correctly.
Clearing the content by selecting, cutting and then repasting the text does not prevent reproduction as long as it is carefully done.
Notepad misinterprets the encoding of the file when it is re-opened. If the file is originally saved as "Unicode" rather than "ANSI" the text displays correctly.
Older versions of Notepad such as those that came with Windows 95, 98 or ME do not include Unicode support so the error does not occur.
Notepad2 (by Florian Balmer) also produce this strange behaviour.
External links
|
