Bush hid the facts

"Bush hid the facts" is a common name for a bug present in Microsoft Windows which causes text encoded in ASCII to be interpreted as if it were UTF-16LE, resulting in garbled text. When the string "Bush hid the facts", without quotes, was put in a new Notepad document and saved, closed, and reopened, the nonsensical sequence of the Chinese characters "畂桳栠摩琠敨映捡獴" would appear instead.^{[citation needed]}

While "Bush hid the facts" is the sentence most commonly presented to induce the error, the bug can be triggered by other strings, for example "hhhh hhh hhh hhhhh"^[1]or"this app can break",^[2] and even "a "or"z!".^[3]

The bug occurs when the string is passed to the Win32 charset detection function IsTextUnicode. IsTextUnicode guesses it is Unicode if the "hi byte" (the odd indexes) changes three times less than the "low byte",^[3] if so it returns true, and the application then incorrectly interprets the text as UTF-16LE.^[4]

The bug had existed since IsTextUnicode was introduced with Windows NT 3.5 in 1994, but was not discovered until early 2004.^[5] Many text editors and tools exhibit this behavior on Windows because they use IsTextUnicode to determine the encoding of text files. As of Windows Vista, Notepad has been modified to use a different detection algorithm that does not exhibit the bug, but IsTextUnicode remains unchanged in the operating system, so any other tools that use the function are still affected.^[6]

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