Search here or search for info on Unicode characters!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/01/15 18:18 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/01/15/353756.aspx

Ok, now appearing on Sorting It All Out, over on the left side of the screen, are search links for Google and MSN, as well as a link for searching for Unicode information at http://FileFormat.Info (special thanks to Andrew for permission!).

I am not going to try to talk up either MSN Search or Google, I am sure you know what both of them are already.

But I will talk up the stuff at FileFormat.Info as it is very cool. You can search by code point in many forms (e.g. U+270D, ✍, 0x270D, etc.) as well as by Unicode name. You can even look at what other people have been looking for at http://www.fileformat.info/search/recent.htm if you are curious what sort of characters interest other people. A very cool site, one I would highly recommend any time you are looking up Unicode character information!

Special thanks to Drew for pointing out David Crump's site and the info there about search links. I was about 90% done with a different solution involving HTML forms that I could not seem to figure out on a Saturday afternoon, but that other solution plugged in quite nicely and appears to work well.

# Alex Fung on 20 Jan 2005 12:55 AM:

The site fileformat.info is dead. It redirects browsers to http://null/

# Michael Kaplan on 20 Jan 2005 1:50 AM:

Alex, I cannot repro this in the links in posts, the search box on the left, or the search links on the left.

I had someone else test too, and they did not see problems either. Not sure what you are seeing, but the links are pretty straightforward.

Maybe a proxy issue on your end?

# Alex Fung on 21 Jan 2005 8:39 AM:

I've tried on two independent networks in HK, one of which doesn't have proxy at all. Gives the same result. "fileformat.info" resolves to [64.0.221.91] which gives the reply header

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: Resin/3.0.7
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Location: http://null/index.htm
Expires: Thu, 01 Dec 1994 16:00:00 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 1031
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 04:35:32 GMT
X-Cache: MISS from proxy1
Connection: close

# Michael Kaplan on 21 Jan 2005 9:03 AM:

This could ne something that is blocked regionally? It is not happening in Seattle, WA, USA.

# Alex Fung on 21 Jan 2005 6:34 PM:

Strange. I just tried this on a US server:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://FileFormat.Info/$1 [P,L]

Gets 404s. If it is [R,L], then I get the 301 redirect to http://null/

Hey I finally got there. But using "http://www.fileformat.info/". without the www (as in your first link above), it doesn't work.

# Michael Kaplan on 21 Jan 2005 9:24 PM:

Hmmm.... every single link to the site that I have done includes the www -- in fact, the link on this page that describes what is happening is the only one that doesn't!
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