note John M. Dlugosz I tried it under Win2k, and got unreadable output.<P> I wonder, what is printf("%c", 2.92e48) <I>supposed</I> to do? There is no character with that number, so I would hope for an error.<P> I'm not sure where it would "naturally" wrap, if that's what it's doing, since the range of legal Unicode ordinals is not a neat power of two. (I'm getting Unicode code points displayed for something like <code>printf '%c',0x434</code> even without a <code>use utf8</code> or other preparation.)<P> I'd be interested to know just what yours is doing. 330784 330784