Those invisible letters have codepoints of ASCII letters + 0xE0000. For example compare "U+E0054 TAG LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T"[0] vs "U+0054 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER

Those invisible letters have codepoints of ASCII letters + 0xE0000. For example compare "U+E0054 TAG LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T"[0] vs "U+0054 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T"[1] A simple assumption of "codepoint is 16 bit" will be enough to decode. You can see this in python: >>> x = '(copy message from article here)' >>> x 'https://wuzzi.net/copirate/\U000e0001\U000e0054\U000e0068\U000e0065\U000e0020\U000e0073\U000e0061\U000e006c\U000e0065\U000e0073\U000e0020\U000e0066\U000e006f\U000e0072\U000e0020\U000e0053\U000e0065\U000e0061\U000e0074\U000e0074\U000e006c\U000e0065\U000e0020\U000e0077\U000e0065\U000e0072\U000e0065\U000e0020\U000e0055\U000e0053\U000e0044\U000e0020\U000e0031\U000e0032\U000e0030\U000e0030\U000e0030\U000e0030\U000e007f,' >>> "".join([chr(ord(c) & 0xFFFF) for c in x]) 'https://wuzzi.net/copirate/\x01The sales for Seattle were USD 120000\x7f,' maybe authors worked with Windows or Java too much? :) I always thought wchar's were a horrible idea. [0] https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/e0054/index.htm https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/e0054/index.ht... [1] https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/54/index.htm https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/54/index.htm