Bush hid the facts

This article is about the software bug. For events occurring during the presidency of George W. Bush, see Presidency of George W. Bush.

"Bush hid the facts" is a common name for a bug present in Microsoft Windows which causes text encoded in ASCII to be interpreted as if it were UTF-16LE, resulting in garbled text. When the string "Bush hid the facts", without quotes, was put in a new Notepad document and saved, closed, and reopened, the nonsensical sequence of the Chinese characters "畂桳栠摩琠敨映捡獴" would appear instead.[1]

While "Bush hid the facts" is the sentence most commonly presented to induce the error, the bug can be triggered by other strings, for example "hhhh hhh hhh hhhhh"[2] or "this app can break",[3] and even "a " or "z!".[1]

Diagram explaining the bug

The bug occurs when the string is passed to the Win32 charset detection function IsTextUnicode. IsTextUnicode guesses it is Unicode if the "hi byte" (the odd indexes) changes three times less than the "low byte",[1] if so it returns true, and the application then incorrectly interprets the text as UTF-16LE.[4]

The bug had existed since IsTextUnicode was introduced with Windows NT 3.5 in 1994, but was not discovered until early 2004.[5] Many text editors and tools exhibit this behavior on Windows because they use IsTextUnicode to determine the encoding of text files. As of Windows Vista, Notepad has been modified to use a different detection algorithm that does not exhibit the bug, but IsTextUnicode remains unchanged in the operating system, so any other tools that use the function are still affected.[6]

Workarounds

Several workarounds exist for this bug:

  • Add a character so the string is an odd number of bytes long.
  • Save the file as "UTF-8" (before 2018) or "UTF-8 with BOM" (after 2018) rather than "ANSI". This prepends a UTF-8 byte order mark which avoids the bug.[citation needed] UTF-8 without the byte order mark would still trigger the bug, as it is identical to the "ANSI" file.
  • Saving as "Unicode", which in Microsoft Windows means UTF-16LE. When loading this text IsTextUnicode should (and does) return true and the text is correct.
  • To retrieve the original text using Notepad, bring up the "Open a file" dialog box, select the file, select "ANSI" or "UTF-8" in the "Encoding" list box, and click Open. Under Windows 2000, Notepad lacks the "Encoding" list box. WordPad appears to load the text correctly without choosing the encoding, since it uses its own encoding detection.

References

  1. ^ a b c "Bush hid the facts" Bug EXPLAINED, 4 July 2023, retrieved 2024-09-04
  2. ^ Christensen, Brett M. (November 2, 2009). "Bush Hid The Facts - Notepad Conspiracy Claim". Hoax Slayer. Archived from the original on 2010-03-15.
  3. ^ Kaplan, Michael S. (14 June 2006). "Behind 'How to break Windows Notepad'". archives.miloush.net. Archived from the original on 25 October 2013. Retrieved 2022-07-12.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  4. ^ Chen, Raymond (March 24, 2004). "Some files come up strange in Notepad". The Old New Thing. Microsoft. Retrieved 2022-07-12.
  5. ^ Cumps, David (February 27, 2004). "Notepad bug? Encoding issue?". #region .Net Blog. Retrieved February 15, 2009.
  6. ^ Kaplan, Michael S. (March 25, 2008). "Bush might've still hid the facts, but he can't hide them from Vista SP1/Server 2008 Notepad!". Retrieved 13 April 2017.