PG editor not decoding as expecting

[Alex-Jordan]

The attached problem file (the same one I posted in #1051) uses the unicode character ␠ to indicate a space. This is:
U+2420 : SYMBOL FOR SPACE

The character is used directly in the pg file. If I open the file up in vim, I see it as ␠. Also the problem renders that character fine when the problem is used in an assignment and a user visits it. And since I use xelatex, it does not break PDF production (although I see now that the font has no character for it and all the user sees is white space.)

But if I open this file in the PG editor, it does not decode that character as intended. The editor shows � and that's what you see in the editor's output panel. And what I see if I make a PDF from the editor.

I am changing the source to use ~~x{2420} and then things seem to all come out fine (except in PDF, where there is no glyph in the font for this). But is there an issue here with character encoding/decoding?

cipher.pg.txt

[drgrice1]

When I view that problem in vim I see 'âÂ<90> '. I noticed in my email client (Thunderbird) it shows up the same as here in GitHub. When the problem renders in a set in Firefox on Linux I see nothing. It doesn't even look like there is white space there. When I open this in the PG editor I see what looks like a red dot where that character is, but I see nothing again in the rendered problem.

I am not sure this is an encoding issue. It seems that everything renders this unicode character differently.

I also tested with ␠ (this is cut and pasted from https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2420). This works consistently in vim, the PG editor, and the rendered problem. Then I cut and pasted the character from your first comment in this GitHub thread, and it also works consistently. So it seems that something went wrong in the encoding/decoding process when you cut and pasted it into the problem initially.