The same thing happens with "this app can break"

It appears to happen with anything containing that amount of characters and spaces, I tried 'four one one seven' which has the same characters and spaces a 'this app can break' and 'bush hid the facts'.

It works with "joel can not dance" too...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notepad

That's kind of old news. Notepad thinks it's UTF-16 string.

It doesn't work with all sentences with that amount of characters and spaces, at least not here. I tried "Brin sez msf sucks" and it didn't work...

This quite old '4+3+3+5' case was covered thoroughly here by Michael S. Kaplan from MSDN:
blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive ...

doesn't work for me on a mac.

"google, do no evil"

See if Microsoft dares translate THAT into Chinese!

May be diff character spacing, but hope springs eternal...

How about:

"free men and women"

Try it and see! How can Microsoft deny that goal to our Chinese friends?

If you translate the Chinese characters back after saving 'bush hid the facts' using Google Translate you get 'Albert 桳 name Mount 敨 video games were 獴'

"I tried "Brin sez msf sucks" and it didn't work..."

Has to be all lowercase. "Bush hid the facts" does not work, but "bush hid the facts" does.

it supposedly workes with any eighteen character string (without regard to spacing), although I haven't been able to get it to work with other phrases such as (among others) "eighteen character".
However, "this was not ready" does work.

lol... really wierd :)

weird, very weird...

Translated is 畂桳栠摩琠敨映捡獴

which have: no meaning at all :P (i am a native chinese speaker)

There's no way to know the encoding of a string, ie, be it UTF or plaintext. So in order to determine if characters are 8 bits or 16 bits, it performs a heuristic search and "guesses". This is one case where the guess is wrong.

oh gosh, I can only recognize 4 of the words...

if you type in

.LOG

as the first line in the notepad file.
everytime you open that file.. it'll automatically insert a timestamp at the end of the file

can come in handy..

WOW, thanks Amol!

... I use notepad a lot, and adding timestamps to entries sure comes in handy to me!

What hidden functionality still is in there? (Maybe this little thing has more functionality than MS Word ;-))

Shameless plug: netpadd.com (like Notepad with more functionality)