# A UniCODE Puzzle

NOTE Please do not edit this puzzle or close for off-topic unless you REALLY know what you're doing. The whole thing, except this note, is part of the puzzle. Thanks!

What unicode character am I?

Hey guys! I'm not sure if this is the right site to put my question on but I am new to Javascript and I am trying to do a variable swap. When I run it it doesn't even run. Could someone explain my error to me?

var x = "E2";
var y = "9A";
var swap = x;
x = y;
y = swap;
console.log(x);


What is the error in My code? i'm very confused. no one I knew cuuld help me. Feel free to delete this if it'ssnot good ?

Hint 1

Find the errors. ALL OF THEM.

Hint 2

Does anyone want to edit my puzzle?

Hint 3

There are 3 parts to this puzzle. Find 2 characters and a message, then you put them together and you will get the answer.

Hint 4

Find the problem with my code first, the secret word second, then another character third.

Hint 5

No hex math operations are necessary.

Hint 6

Order: x y comment

Hint 7

Use Hex UTF-8 when you figure out Hint 6.

Hint 8

Use INCORRECT not CORRECTED (if you figured out this step- it's the one with the U)

Hint 9

Think .?!

# Who solved it?

The different pieces of this puzzle were solved by many people. Many of the answers expanded on previous knowledge to finally come to the solution. I am crediting the first person to find it.

Character 1 (debugging the code):

@athin

Character 2 (Find the 3 pieces):

Third bit discovered by: @wolfram42

Put together by: @nneonneo

Word Puzzle:

@Buildstarted found the majority of it, but a crucial part was missing. @Reinier found the rest of it, which enabled them to find the correct solution.

Put together (solved):

@Reinier

• honestly pretty unique puzzle. should take the note out to see how much times you get flagged ;D – L_Church Mar 29 '18 at 15:36
• @L_Church Agreed, would be hilarious. – Azync Mar 29 '18 at 16:27
• @yummypasta Very nice puzzle :-) I really enjoyed it! – NAMELESS Mar 29 '18 at 16:37

I think you might be

🇬🇷, or the flag of Greece.

As others have pointed out,

in the code there is a Greek question mark, and also ⚑, so a flag, can be found by putting together the values of x, y and the comment. Furthermore, others have found the mistakes spelling out "Minus". However, also the space and the question mark on the end should be a period, so this would make the message "Minus ?". So the complete result is "Greek question mark flag minus ?", making "Greek flag".

Ok well..

When I try to copy paste the code, I can't run it because there is some "error", on the second row, on the last character.

I use

and found that

The last "semicolon" on second line is Greek Question Mark symbol (U+037E / UTF-8: CDBE)!

• Yes. That is definitely a clue, but not the full answer. – yummypasta Mar 29 '18 at 16:53
• @yummypasta You edited out that symbol in your question. Accident, or part of the puzzle? – Paul Parker Mar 30 '18 at 1:11
• @PaulParker Thank you sooo much! I don't know how it got edited out. I edited my question on a phone, so maybe it did some magic behind the scenes? – yummypasta Mar 30 '18 at 2:44

You are

U+2313 "SEGMENT" (⌓). Maybe named such because of the "code segment" of a program (I'm grasping here).

Part 1:

U+2691 "BLACK FLAG" (⚑). 0xe2 0x9a 0x91 (0xe2 from x, 0x9a from y, 0x91 from the comment) is the UTF-8 encoding for this character.

Part 2:

"Minus ", which is encoded in the errors from the second bit of text.

Part 3:

U+037E "GREEK QUESTION MARK" (;). This is the semicolon-looking character at the end of the second line of code (which causes a JavaScript error, exactly as reported by the supposed question-asker).

Taken together:

I supposed that part two means to subtract the Unicode code point numbers, so we get 0x2691 - 0x37e = 0x2313 for the final codepoint.

You are the Egyptian hieroglyph for temple/shrine called Naos U+1326C. There are references to multiple unicode letters in the code block as well as a few wrong letters in the later text. These are E2=â, 9A=š, 91=', swapped out characters (correct character-> displayed character) are I->i, m->M, ' '->n, N->n, and o->u. This can be rearranged to 'I'm Nâoš;' which is Unicode character U+1326C.

• You are on the right track with finding the errors... Look again for more of them! However, your end answer is incorrect, but good guess! – yummypasta Mar 29 '18 at 16:55

You are

͞ , or the combining diacritic macron (whatever that means, a line over some to-be-specified character I think?), hex number 0x35e. Hint 3 says to find two characters and a number. As athin pointed out, one of the semicolons is actually the greek question mark, 0x37e. Looking at the typos/grammatical errors, we get m->M, I->i, N->n, o->u, ' '->s, which either spells 'minos' or 'minus'. Minus makes a lot more sense. We also have an extra space before the last question mark. Spaces are 0x20. 0x37e - 0x20 = 0x35e, which is ' ͞ ' as mentioned above.

• Thanks for editing, I wasn't sure how to do spoilers properly. – nymvaline Mar 29 '18 at 19:55
• You just need to put >! on each line (including blank ones) – NoOneIsHere Mar 29 '18 at 20:19
• You are correct about character 1 (the “gqm”) and your interpretation of the words is also correct (the one with a u), but missing one key part (think .!?). But you have yet to find the 3rd character. So your answer is wrong, but the clues you put together are correct. – yummypasta Mar 29 '18 at 21:06

<!-- 91 --> Appears as an html comment. So it doesn't show up in the question only shows up when editing.

EDIT1: As someone else mentioned there is also the illegal semicolon with unicode: 0x37E

EDIT2: There is a hidden message in the incorrect characters. Taking them out and putting them together we get "Minus". (0x37E - 0x91) = Ox2ED which is "˭"

• You found part of a clue... but not the answer. I edited the question to clarify you're looking for what character i am. – yummypasta Mar 29 '18 at 15:35
• I have updated my answer to resolve to a character. – wolfram42 Mar 29 '18 at 15:53
• It seems as you put the wrong clues together. Try again! – yummypasta Mar 29 '18 at 16:52
• I think i got it this time – wolfram42 Mar 29 '18 at 17:33
• not quite yet... you found one character (the “gqm”) and the word portion. You are close to finding the second character. Hint: no hex operations will be necessary. – yummypasta Mar 29 '18 at 21:13

Considering the lateral thinking tag.

You have specified E2, 9A, cuuld(u), it'snnot(n) and I in your question. From this we can get the unicode U+9AE2 which is called wig and means relation(swap ?) in Japanese.

What is the error in My code?

A proper wig is missing in your dress code. :D

• Good guess, but you put together the wrong clues. Look for more errors! – yummypasta Mar 29 '18 at 17:10
• @yummypasta Are you expecting an answer like this or more straight one ? – ran Mar 29 '18 at 17:18
• It's pretty straightforward. Just look for more clues and put them together. – yummypasta Mar 29 '18 at 17:20
• Not sure of the noteworthiness, but it'snnot has been changed to it'ssnot – David Starkey Mar 29 '18 at 19:35
• The ssnot change was because of an error on my part. No answers that really got that part of the puzzle were posted, so it shouldn’t change much. – yummypasta Mar 29 '18 at 21:00

I think you are:

U+1F61C 😜

The 1st part:

There was a semicolon not working, thank you @athin for your unicode finder!

the 2nd part:

The mistakes spelled the word MINUS, most people found this one

the 3rd part:

because of the hint 6, I found E2 9A 91, which is ⚑ in unicode

put together:

if I take all of them together, I get ;-⚑, and to me this is clearly an emote of a winking guy with his tongue out, so I looked for the corresponding unicode char -> U+1F61C 😜

☼ "I'm a sun". E2 = A, 9A = S, 91 = '. Incorrect letters from the last part are M, I, N, U, S... if y == swap and the letter we are meant to swap is 's' i assume we are meant to swap the last s for what it should be a space character. And the last space character before the ? gives us two spaces.

I really think it's this one though:

🍝 :)

• You are incorrect about the swapping and the final answer. However, you are correct about the word puzzle. So you have found the word potion, now you have to find the two characters that will complete it. 🍝 – yummypasta Mar 29 '18 at 21:09

Hint number six gives the key:

order: x y comment

So we have three parts:

x and y are given literally in the source code and the comment is, well, a comment when you try to edit the question.

Specifically, their values are,

$x$ = E2, $y$ = 9A, comment=91

Putting those together we get a sensible answer as

three bytes of UTF-8:

$charname$(printf "\xe2\x9a\x91")
⚑       U+2691  BLACK FLAG

This can be reconciled with the two hints like so:

The error in the javascript is a Greek Question Mark. The typos in the text can spell either MINOS or MINUS (it is ambiguous). What is the most famous legend about black flags? That would be the Greek myth of Theseus in which he absentmindedly flew black sails on his ship as he returned home victorious, causing his father to throw himself off a cliff thinking Theseus was dead. And where was Theseus returning from? That's right, from King MINOS of Crete, who had imprisoned Theseus in a labyrinth with the Minotaur.

However, the other clues specifically say that the puzzle is not so simple, that there are actually two other hidden

characters. Could those be our $x$ and $y$ ?

An easy one to see is in the Javascript where the problem with the code is

the Greek Question Mark (U+037E) which looks like a semicolon. So, perhaps $x$ = 037E.

Another is spelled out by

typos, MINUS. There are currently 26 different types of MINUS symbols defined in Unicode, the most common ones being U+002D (HYPHEN-MINUS) and U+2212 (MINUS SIGN). Let's discard the latter as ideally we're looking for a single byte. So, $y$ = 2D.

Neither of those make much sense since

UTF-8 bytes, when not simply being a superset of ASCII, always have the high bit set and that isn't the case with these. In fact, since we're composing a three byte sequence, we know that the first nybble of the first byte has to be 1110, or hex digit 'E'.

If we try putting those together anyway we get this gibberish:

printf "\x03\x7e\x2d\x91"
~-�

Therefore, the most straight forward interpretation of those characters cannot be right.

Is there any way to reinterpret them so they might make sense?

Well, we could treat the Greek Question Mark as either an actual question mark (U+3F) or as a semicolon (U+3B). That would get rid of those problem of it being two bytes long.

However, it doesn't fix the problem that neither is valid in a

UTF-8 sequence.

But what if hint #7 is a red herring? What would we see if we looked at the sequence

as ASCII instead of UTF-8?

In order to do that, we'll have to reinterpret the third number as decimal instead of hex (to make it less than 128). That would give us

printf "\x3b\x2d\x\\$(echo 'obase=16; 91' | bc)\n"
;-[

Which does look an awful lot like

an emoticon, though I'm not sure which one that'd be. Maybe winking / crying / dracula teeth? ;-[

Plausible, but extremely unlikely. Thus, I'll stick with

⚑ Black Flag

• Your interpretation of the second character is correct. Your interpretation of the word portion is also correct, but missing ONE VITAL PIECE (look for more errors!). Once you find that last error, put them all together and the answer will become very clear. Good job! – yummypasta Mar 30 '18 at 16:30
• And to clarify, the correct solution to the word problems is the one with the U. – yummypasta Mar 30 '18 at 16:31

You have set the variables to each other, Since swap is equal to x then x equal to y then y is equal to swap. You have confused the compliler its trying to console.log(x); while x equal to y and y is equal to swap which is equal to y.

• Not quite. That is valid swap code. Look closer. Also, the top of the puzzle says to look for a character. Good luck! – yummypasta Mar 29 '18 at 21:34

Is it U+02D9 , top dot. I got the Greek-question char, the minus bit and then found the third character , conspicuous by its absence.

Thanks for the puzzle btw.

• Not quite right... – yummypasta Mar 30 '18 at 0:33
• How did you get top dot? I noticed that there's a center dot looking marker · at U+0387 called GREEK ANO TELEIA which Unicode says, "functions in Greek like a semicolon." – hackerb9 Mar 30 '18 at 15:23

You are the letter

Α (which is not the same as A!)

because you are made up of three parts:

1. the Greek Question Mark (;) U+037E

2. the phrase "MINUS ?"

3. the hexadecimal number 91

which can be thought of as

(Greek Question Mark) - (Question Mark) + 91

which sums to

Greek + 91

Well, as it happens, in Unicode, the

Greek region starts at 0300

which means, we get a result of

0300 + 91 = 0391

which is the character

Α U+0391 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA

• Interesting approach, but Reinier has the correct solution. If you want to solve it yourself and you're stumped, take a look at hint 2, 6, and 7. Good luck! – yummypasta Mar 30 '18 at 16:55