U+FFFE "￾" Specials Unicode Character

U+FFFE "￾" Specials is a noncharacter permanently reserved for internal use and specifically designed to detect byte order in text data, as its name and position within the "Specials" block indicate. Unlike most encoded characters, U+FFFE is intentionally not intended for normal text interchange; instead, it serves as a byte order mark (BOM) counterpart to U+FEFF, the zero width no-break space, which when reversed in byte order becomes U+FFFE. This means that if a system receives this character unexpectedly, it signals that the text's byte serialization is in the opposite byte order from what was assumed, helping applications identify and correct endianness issues.

General Properties

Code Point	U+FFFE
Version Added	1.1
Block	Specials
General Category	Unassigned
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Boundary Neutral

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	
HTML Hex Encoding	
UTF-8 Encoding	0xEF 0xBF 0xBE
UTF-16 Encoding	0xFFFE
UTF-32 Encoding	0x0000FFFE
C/C++/Java Escape	\ufffe

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check	Yes
NFD Quick Check	Yes
NFKC Quick Check	Yes
NFKD Quick Check	Yes
Numeric Type	None
Numeric Value	NaN
Line Break	Unknown
Script	Unknown
Script Extensions	Unknown
Indic Syllabic Category	Other
Vertical Orientation	Rotated
Grapheme Cluster Break	Other
Word Break	Other
Sentence Break	Other
Noncharacter Code Point	Yes