A few years ago I was consuming a SOAP webservice from a Remedy ticket handling system. While developing my end of it, I saw all sorts of weird 3-character clus

A few years ago I was consuming a SOAP webservice from a Remedy ticket handling system. While developing my end of it, I saw all sorts of weird 3-character clusters in some notes fields. I don't remember what they were exactly, but something like � (I just did that in CyberChef, I don't think that's what it really was at the time. It was only 3 glyphs I'm sure.) I started digging into it, a eventually worked out that some system at the start of the chain was using the ASCII US and RS characters to separate the notes! Each note would have the format of timestamp␟username␟note␞timestamp␟username␟note and so on. Then, through some chain of black boxes I never got to see, those ASCII values were converted into the visual ones I used above (U+241E and U+241F), then those were misinterpreted into Latin1 or some other non-Unicode encoding. What came out the other end were the jumbled messes I saw. I ended up just searching and splitting on those messy characters to recover the structured format of the notes. (They were all dumped into a single field in the SOAP record. I hate SOAP enough as it is, but was amazed how our systems managed to ruin it even more :)