Unicode gives every character a number and an official name. U+FE18 is a sideways bracket for Chinese text set top to bottom. Since 2005 its name has been PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL RIGHT WHITE LENTICULAR BRAKCET.
Nobody will ever fix the damn thing. Unicode had already promised that published names never change. Software finds characters by exact name, so a corrected spelling would break any code that used the wrong one. The fix went beside the mistake instead: a second official name, spelled right. Both are permanent.
Anyone who has run a public API knows this move. Once other people build on your mistake, you can't edit it. You can only add something next to it.
- The promise: Since Unicode 2.0 (1996), character names "will not be changed."
- The twin: U+FE17, the matching left-hand bracket, is spelled correctly.
- The patch: One line in NameAliases.txt:
FE18;…BRACKET;correction - Also frozen: Once an alias is assigned, it is never changed or removed.
- In code: Python's
\N{...}escape accepts either spelling. - Official shrug: Unicode's own charts call the typo a "known defect."
- Why it exists: Clean conversion from GB 18030, China's national character-encoding standard.
- Same disease: HTTP's "Referer" header has been misspelled since 1996 and can't be fixed either.