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Puzzle 10: Explanation

Let’s learn how UTF-8 encoded character comparison works in Rust.

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Test it out

Hit “Run” to see the code’s output.

C++
fn main() {
    if 'X' == 'Χ' {
        println!("It matches!");
    } else {
        println!("It doesn't match.");
    }
}

Explanation

Unicode allows for homoglyphs, which are characters that are very similar or identical and can be encoded in different ways. The first X is the Latin Unicode character, encoded as 0x58. The second Χ is the capitalized version of the Greek letter chi, encoded in UTF- 8 as 0xCE 0xA7. If we look closely, they aren’t quite identical, but in some fonts, notably Consolas on Windows, they are indistinguishable.

Homoglyphs are popular in ...