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 want a kinder, gentler nation.”
—George Bush (b. 1924)
“Let the trumpet of the day of judgment sound when it will, I shall appear with this book in my hand before the Sovereign Judge, and cry with a loud voice, This is my work, there were my thoughts, and thus was I. I have freely told both the good and the bad, have hid nothing wicked, added nothing good.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)
“Is it true or false that Belfast is north of London? That the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg? That Beethoven was a drunkard? That Wellington won the battle of Waterloo? There are various degrees and dimensions of success in making statements: the statements fit the facts always more or less loosely, in different ways on different occasions for different intents and purposes.”
—J.L. (John Langshaw)