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Why are the text fields blank?

Hextrapolate provides two adjustable fields for showing a number in a text encoding (ASCII, UTF-8 or UTF-16).

If you enter a number which does not have a valid representation in the specified text encoding then the corresponding field will appear as blank.

This can occur quite often in the case of ASCII because the ASCII text encoding only contains 95 printable characters. It can also happen in the case of UTF-8; even though UTF-8 is capable of encoding thousands of different characters it requires the bytes to be in a very specific order, so it is quite easy to enter numbers which do not respond to valid UTF-8 text.

UTF-16 spans a much wider range of possible values and so is less likely to show as a blank field.

See also

ASCII text encoding

text encodings

Why doesn't Hextrapolate let me type the characters I want?