characterswithout

Characterswithout is a term used in digital typography and data processing to describe text in which one or more characters are missing, either by design or by error. It is not a formal standard but a descriptive label used in discussions of representation, encoding, and rendering.

The phrase is a compound of "characters" and "without" and does not reference a single system or protocol. In practice, it appears in documentation and discussions about how text can become incomplete when glyphs are not available, when strings are truncated, or when redaction processes replace content with placeholders.

In typography, a characterswithout situation occurs when a font lacks glyphs for particular code points or when shaping engines fail to map characters to visible forms, resulting in spaces or blank boxes where characters should appear. In data processing, it can refer to truncated strings after sanitization, encoding conversions, or input validation errors, where the resulting data lacks expected characters such as punctuation, diacritics, or letters.

Examples include a web page that fails to render non‑ASCII characters, replacing them with blank spaces, or a redaction tool that removes sensitive words, leaving a sequence of missing characters. The concept is commonly discussed alongside topics such as Unicode, glyphs, font rendering, string sanitization, redaction, and data integrity.