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> Unicode has the original ASCII hyphen-minus (U+002d), as well as a dedicated hyphen (U+2010), other functional hyphens…

Which can be fun when parsing CSV files from various sources. I've hit numbers with U2010 or others where you would expect a hyphen-minus should be. Presumably someone² has copied a negative number from a document where one of the alternate symbols was used, and pasted it into everyone's favourite data-mangler¹ which interpreted it as a string, and so on down the chain.

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[1] Excel. Sometimes a joy, sometimes the bane of my existence.

[2] It is surprising, horrifying even, how much manual manipulation of data goes on in banking, where you might naturally assume everything is more automated these days. Sometimes a laborious manual process done regularly is seen as cheaper than paying for it to be automated…




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