Hi! I'm working on a new project, and it uses a sort of save and load system. (Nothing with the cloud, just character codes.) However, they need to store a fairly large amount of data, and in order to do so without having the codes be thousands of characters long, I've created a script to be able to store them in unicode characters, which can hold much more numerical data.
However, this does bring up a pretty important question: Does the Snap! forum work with unicode characters? (Or at least the ones that the unicode as letter block can handle, from ranges 1 to 65535)
I'm pretty sure the forums work with all unicode characters.
Some devices might not be able to display some characters, but it's not a problem with the forums.
One question: are the forums involved with your project? If so, how? If not, why are you asking?
I'm guessing they want people to be able to share their load codes on the forum.
You can't post binary data as a Unicode characters. Not all combinations are permitted.
Some kind of encoding is necessary, like Base64 or Quoted Printable.
Oh, that would make sense. (Just realized I didn't fully read the description of the project, that's why I didn't know.)
@the_meep111
By the way, there are more than 65,535 unicode characters that the unicode block can report...
(89,528 more, to be exact, possibly even more than that)
...you might be able to use that to make the save codes a lot shorter.
You can also just save it with the localstorage blocks in the database library
But that doesn't help with sharing codes, which is the entire reason to send them on the forum.
I found that 65535 is the sort of limit, as trying to use (unicode of _) doesn't work with anything greater than that. However, the actual limit I've found is 55291, as everything after that is those blank boxes, which cannot be copied and pasted for some reason.
I'm not really going to be using specifically binary, just regular base 10 data, or numbers. I've made a system that allows me to condense all of the information down into unicode characters, only being around 400 characters long for even a very large code. I wanted to know if this could be copied on to the forum, and it would actually display and not break anything.
it looks to me like they'll have a "input save code here" ask block, based off of
and are asking if the forum supports unicode characters (???) so you can store yours there
Yep, more or less. (I want to avoid giving away what I'm making, I want it to be a surprise XD)
It's not completely unheard of, since sharing level codes in a forum happens a lot on scratch.
The reason they're wondering what unicode characters the forum supports, is because the forum may remove characters from the message if it's not in some range.
The blank boxes just means the font snap is using doesn't have a symbol to use for those characters. They are still legitimate characters, they just cant be rendered.
...
The "blank boxes" you're finding are characters that your system's (or Snap!'s) font doesn't support.
I just found out about the issue you might've been having. (Sorry it took so long!)
The unicode (65) as letter block actually has a range of 1 to 1,114,111.
Proof
There are also 3 unicode blocks - sections of characters in unicode - in which there aren't valid characters, but are reserved as "private use areas," allowing the characters to be used for anything... locally.
These 3 PUAs are located at:
- Block A U+E000 - U+F8FF (57344 to 63743)
- Block B U+F0000 - U+FFFFD (983040 to 1048573)
- Block C U+100000 - U+10FFFF (1048576 to 1114111)
Another thing is that all unicode characters require their respective fonts to be rendered correctly, most of which most devices don't have pre-installed, or Snap! probably doesn't even support.
These characters are what appear in Snap! as...
...which can be copied and pasted, but only within Snap! as far as I know. Pasting them into Google or the forums won't work, but they're usable in the editor however you want.
I also found out that the unicode of [a] block does in fact return incorrect values for any character with a unicode value greater than 65535 like you said, though it isn't actually the limit as previously stated. However, I found a block by cymplecy which mostly solves this.
(It doesn't work with BH's favorite character, though...)
Anyways, here's the block...
...and here's the forum page in which I found it in case you'd like to read BH's input on high-value unicodes in Snap!