Re: highlighting non-ASCII characters

[Stefan Monnier]

>> If we go for such a metric, it would need to be augmented by a
>> database of words where a small number of such characters is
>> ``normal'', not to be highlighted.  This is for words like naïve.
>> Otherwise the feature will be an annoyance.
> It's also dependent on which characters they are - Cyrillic, Han, Greek,
> Hebrew etc should be expected to appear in long runs, perhaps with runs of
> ASCII and/or other characters interleaved.  Latin-1 on the other hand would
> normally appear individually or in very short runs mixed in with ASCII.

> There is no single heuristic that can be used to identify
> "suspicious" characters.

Maybe within the scope of "social engineering attacks where some text
(e.g. a host name) looks like something well-known but actually uses
funny Unicode chars", some people have come up with something like
a list of known problems (typically Unicode points that are usually
displayed identically).


        Stefan