Various non-control characters are interpreted as control characters by the console.

Description

The following character is erroneously interpreted as the escape character U+001B:

← Leftwards Arrow U+2190

Hence instead of seeing a left arrow in the console as expected, I can write ANSI escapes only using this non-control-character. But the obvious downside is that I cannot show the left arrow character in the console.

More generally

Thus instead of printing the IBM-437 graphemes for the Unicode code points listed below, these code points are interpreted as the C0 control characters 1-31.

By typing Alt+1..Alt+31 I am able to produce the IBM-437 graphemes used in DOS for control characters if you would write the bytes 1-31 to the video memory directly: ☺☻♥♦♣♠•◘○◙♂♀♪♫☼►◄↕‼¶§▬↨↑↓→←∟↔▲▼

Which GitHub apparently is able to show very colorfully:

☺☻♥♦♣♠•◘○◙♂♀♪♫☼►◄↕‼¶§▬↨↑↓→←∟↔▲▼

These are however the following Unicode code points (from 1 to 31):

       \u263a \u263b \u2665 \u2666 \u2663 \u2660 \u2022 \u25d8 \u25cb \u25d9 \u2642 \u2640 \u266a \u266b \u263c
\u25ba \u25c4 \u2195 \u203c \u00b6 \u00a7 \u25ac \u21a8 \u2191 \u2193 \u2192 \u2190 \u221f \u2194 \u25b2 \u25bc

Those between Alt+7 and Alt+15 and Alt+27 don't show correctly.

These correspond to \a\b\t\n\v\f\r (\u0007-\u000d) and escape (\u001b). The other two are \u000e (SI Shift In) and \u000f (SO Shift Out).

Reproduction Steps

Console.Title = "ANSI but not ANSI";
var s = "\u2190";
var m = $"\\u{(int)s[0]:x4}: {s}[9mSTRIKETHROUGH???{s}[29m";
var h = (int)m[8];
Console.WriteLine($"0x{h:x4}");
Console.WriteLine(m);
s = "☺☻♥♦♣♠•◘○◙♂♀♪♫☼►◄↕‼¶§▬↨↑↓→←∟↔▲▼";
for (var i = 0; i < s.Length; i++)
    Console.WriteLine($"{i + 1:x2}: \\u{(int)s[i]:x4} {s[i]}←[0m");

Actual behavior

Expected behavior

PS C:\>
>> $s = [string][char]0x2190
>> $m = "\u{0:x4}: {1}[9mSTRIKETHROUGH???{1}[29m" -f @([int]$s[0], $s)
>> $h = [int]$m[8]
>> Write-Host ("0x{0:x4}" -f $h)
>> Write-Host $m
0x2190
\u2190: ←[9mSTRIKETHROUGH???←[29m
PS C:\> Write-Host "☺☻♥♦♣♠•◘○◙♂♀♪♫☼►◄↕‼¶§▬↨↑↓→←∟↔▲▼"
☺☻♥♦♣♠•◘○◙♂♀♪♫☼►◄↕‼¶§▬↨↑↓→←∟↔▲▼
PS C:\> [System.IO.File]::WriteAllText("C:\test.txt", "☺☻♥♦♣♠•◘○◙♂♀♪♫☼►◄↕‼¶§▬↨↑↓→←∟↔▲▼", [System.Text.Encoding]::Unicode)

Regression?

I have seen this a few years before when source generators were new and on my old computer with Windows 10 at that time.

Known Workarounds

Nope, I think I am stuck with just ↑↓→ as far as those arrows are concerned.

Configuration

Windows Terminal 1.15.3466.0 Windows 11 10.0.22621.1105

PSVersion 7.3.1

.NET SDK:
 Version:   7.0.101
 Commit:    bb24aafa11

Runtime Environment:
 OS Name:     Windows
 OS Version:  10.0.22621
 OS Platform: Windows
 RID:         win10-x64
 Base Path:   C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\7.0.101\

Host:
  Version:      7.0.1
  Architecture: x64
  Commit:       97203d38ba

Other information

Could argue it is translating the Unicode to a single-byte code page, but then I seriously don't get why I get ANSI VT processing without doing anything. If anyone would have called the appropriate API's to enable VT processing by default, why hadn't it also enabling Unicode? AFAIK both are compat breaking changes for old console apps.