Unicode Explained

out-of-the-band information to indicate the script of a fragment—e.g., as part of

language code.

Character

This level is covered well in the Unicode standard. As we can see, the standard

assigns each character a script.

Although many blocks in Unicode contain characters from one script, and might have

been named according to a script, there is no one-to-one correspondence between

blocks and scripts. Some blocks contain characters from different scripts, and some

scripts have been divided into several blocks (e.g., Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement,

Latin Extended-A, etc.). Therefore, the Unicode standard defines a separate property

that specifies the script of a character, Script (sc).

Scripts and spoofing

Script information has become more important due to use of mixing characters from

different scripts in order to misguide people by “spoofing.” The idea in the kind of

spoofing discussed here is to present text to the user in a format that looks correct but

internally means something different. Spoofing is possible even within one script. The

familiar example is the use of “l” (lowercase letter “l”) instead of “1” (digit one), or vice

versa, making use of the fact that in many fonts, they are hard to distinguish. Another

old example is the confusion between “O” (capital letter “o”) and “0” (digit zero),

although they are rather different in most modern fonts, when you see both of them.

Spoofing ...