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Hi all,

In a script that I've been working on forever, I need a pair of characters that aren't typically used in strings, to use as delimeters and for marking special substrings. These characters would be used internally by the script to encode various things

My first thought is to use the ASCII BEL, BS, or EOT characters. For example, I might want to do
However, these ASCII characters are nonprinting, so they make the code hard to read.

However, I have seen characters with umlauts and accents in AHK code.
Can anyone elighten me on what is going on here. I'd love to be able to choose arbitrary unicode characters, but I've read that AHK doesn't support unicode.

Then I wondered if maybe AHK could use the umlauted characters because it can use ANSI characters (i.e. Windows-1252). I've seen references to ASCII characters in the documentation, but never ANSI ones. Does AHK use ANSI internally?

Any information greatly appreciated. Please go easy on me, because while I've done some research, I don't have much background in this.

Yes, you can use characters like ñ and Ö as delimiters. AHK apparently uses the ansi code page internally, so any ansi character between 1 and 255 is ok with AHK.

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Thanks!

I think I've settled on using ¬, «, », and § in my script for now.

So are ANSI encodings deep in AHK in such a way that I can be confident that commands will be pretty robust? Is anyone aware of any limitations involved with using the full set of ANSI characters in AHK? I'd hate to get pretty far into a project only to discover a key limitation that renders the basic design strategy impractical.

I am constantly using the full set, since cyrillic letters are mapped to the upper half of the ANSI codes. One problem with the upper codes is that they may denote different characters in different locales. In my locale, the default codepage is Windows-1251, not 1252, so my ANSI charset does not include, for example, German letters with umlauts because their codes are used for cyrillic characters. However, this is only a representation problem; AutoHotkey actually works not with characters as we see them on the screen but with character codes.

Thanks, YMP. That's very helpful to know.