Bush hid the facts

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Bush hid the facts is the common name for a bug present in all versions of Microsoft Notepad before Windows Vista, which misinterpret a file in Windows-1252 or similar encoding as UTF-16.

While "Bush hid the facts" is the sentence that is most forwarded on the Internet, it does not exclusively occur with that phrase. The bug can be triggered by many sentences, including those that follow a particular structure: one word with 4 letters, two or more words with 3 letters, one word with 5 letters. Some phrases that will trigger this oddity are: "Bill can not dance", "John has the parts", "Iraq can own bases", "This app can break", "Feel the new power", and "Matrix can not lie". The bug occurs when such a string is entered into Notepad (with no other characters) and then saved as a text file. Upon reloading the file into Notepad, the text will be replaced with nine Chinese characters, or squares if the language pack has not been installed. To retrieve the original text, bring up the "Open a file" dialog box, select "ANSI" in the "Encoding" list box, and open the file.

[edit] Discovery

The bug appeared for the first time in Windows 2000 but was not discovered immediately. It was discovered in early 2004 [1] and has since risen in popularity on the Internet.^{[citation needed]}

This bug occurs when a file where only the above mentioned string is present. If the file were to be modified by clearing the content and repasting the same string, saved and reopened, this bug will not be reproduced.

Notepad misinterprets the encoding of the file when it is re-opened. If the file is originally saved as "Unicode" rather than "ANSI" the text displays correctly. Older versions of Notepad such as those that came with Windows 95, 98 or ME do not include Unicode support so the error does not occur.