Bush Hid The Facts

Bush hid the facts is a common name for a bug present in some Microsoft Windows applications, which causes a file of text encoded in ASCII or its superset (such as in a Windows code page) to be interpreted as if it were UTF-16LE, resulting in mojibake. When "Bush hid the facts" (without newline) is put in a new Notepad document and saved, closed, and reopened, the nonsensical words "畂桳栠摩琠敨映捡獴" (Liu Benrenmotian Touyingjianmeng) appear instead.

While "Bush hid the facts" is the sentence most commonly presented on the Internet to induce the error, the bug can be triggered by many sentences with characters and spaces in a particular order so that the bytes match the UTF-16LE encoding of valid (if nonsensical) Chinese Unicode characters. Other popular strings are "this app can break", "acre vai pra globo" (Portuguese for "acre goes to Globe"), and "aaaa aaa aaa aaaaa".

The bug occurs when the string is passed to the Win32 charset detection function IsTextUnicode with no other characters. IsTextUnicode sees what it thinks is valid UTF-16LE Chinese and returns true, and the application then incorrectly interprets the text as UTF-16LE.

Many text editors and tools exhibit this behavior because they use IsTextUnicode as well.

Read more about Bush Hid The Facts:  Discovery, Workarounds

Famous quotes containing the words bush, hid and/or facts:

    I will cut the head off my baby and swallow it if it will make Bush lose.
    Zainab Ismael, Iraqi housewife. As quoted in Newsweek magazine, p. 31 (November 16, 1992)

    I hid my love when young till I
    Couldn’t bear the buzzing of a fly;
    I hid my life to my despite
    Till I could not bear to look at light:
    I dare not gaze upon her face
    But left her memory in each place;
    Where’er I saw a wild flower lie
    I kissed and bade my love good-bye.
    John Clare (1793–1864)

    Experiences in order to be educative must lead out into an expanding world of subject matter, a subject matter of facts or information and of ideas. This condition is satisfied only as the educator views teaching and learning as a continuous process of reconstruction of experience.
    John Dewey (1859–1952)