Funny thing that have to be noticed with Notepad

A Hole In Notepad

Now, this is something cool Over at WinCustomize, someone thought they found an Easter Egg in the Windows Notepad application. But he infact found something weird in it.

It works like this:

1. Open Notepad
2. Type the text this app can break.
3. Save the file.
4. Re-open the file in Notepad.

Notepad displays seemingly-random Chinese characters, or boxes if your default Notepad font doesn't support those characters.

It's not an Easter egg (even though it seems like a funny one), and as it turns out, Notepad writes the file correctly. It's only when Notepad reads the file back in that it seems to lose its mind.

But we can't even blame Notepad: it's a limitation of Windows itself, specifically the Windows function that Notepad uses to figure out if a text file is Unicode or not.

So, how's this trick? If this works, do let me know whether you got boxes or some Chinese character. Well, I got Chinese characters. This works in Windows XP, but I am not sure about Windows Vista.