Re: Re: Qemu for DOS doors?
By: Nightfox to Kirkman on Wed Dec 05 2018 05:43 pm

It seems your apostrophe characters are probably using a different encoding that's causing them to not be displayed well in a text terminal.

I noticed something similar from my messages when I did a few backreads via the BBS. It was obviously the text editor that was the culprit. As far as I recall, my text editor was using Unicode. I thought Unicode was backwards compatible with ASCII. As long as you're using an English keyboard, the codes are supposed to be identical? Obviously, I must be wrong on this, but that was my previous assumption. I resolved the issue by switching to medit and changing the default encoding to ASCII. At least, I hope it's resolved.

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Re: Encoding
By: Chai to Nightfox on Fri Dec 07 2018 11:33 pm

I noticed something similar from my messages when I did a few backreads via the BBS. It was obviously the text editor that was the culprit. As far as I recall, my text editor was using Unicode. I thought Unicode was backwards compatible with ASCII. As long as you're using an English keyboard, the codes are supposed to be identical?

I'm not sure. I know ASCII uses 8-bit (or 7-bit?) values, and Unicode uses 16-bit values. I'm not sure the Unicode values for English characters are the same as the ASCII values.

Nightfox

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Re: Encoding
By: Chai to Nightfox on Fri Dec 07 2018 11:33 pm

Re: Re: Qemu for DOS doors?
By: Nightfox to Kirkman on Wed Dec 05 2018 05:43 pm

It seems your apostrophe characters are probably using a different encoding that's causing them to not be displayed well in a text terminal.

I noticed something similar from my messages when I did a few backreads via the BBS. It was obviously the text editor that was the culprit. As far as I recall, my text editor was using Unicode. I thought Unicode was backwards compatible with ASCII. As long as you're using an English keyboard, the codes are supposed to be identical? Obviously, I must be wrong on this, but

i'm surprised someone is even using the web browser for regular msg base use. the web interface msg system is pretty limited, i thought. i havent looked in a year or so.
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Re: Encoding
By: Nightfox to Chai on Sat Dec 08 2018 00:28:54

I'm not sure. I know ASCII uses 8-bit (or 7-bit?) values, and Unicode uses 16-bit values. I'm not sure the Unicode values for English characters are the same as the ASCII values.

IIRC Unicode uses anywhere from one to four bytes to encode a character.
ASCII is valid UTF-8 but the opposite is not always true. Normally this isn't a problem if characters > 127 are ignored when interpreting the input as ASCII, but we don't generally do that in BBS-land.

In this case a Mac was using some fancy apostrophes or something which were encoded into two or more bytes. Terminals expecting CP437 showed several characters in place of the intended one.

Incidentally and off on a tangent, I once had a print-accounting system break on me because somebody included an emoji in their document title. The system attempted to log the print job, but the database wasn't set up to handle strings with that character width. This stuff causes little problems everywhere, and cleaning up inputs is important.

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MRO wrote to Chai <=-

i'm surprised someone is even using the web browser for regular msg
base use. the web interface msg system is pretty limited, i thought. i havent looked in a year or so.

I haven't used the web interface for messaging, but I'm sure if I did,
I'd agree. I use QWK mail because I can be distracted in the middle of
the message, and not get timed out.

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Nightfox wrote to Chai <=-

I'm not sure. I know ASCII uses 8-bit (or 7-bit?) values, and Unicode uses 16-bit values. I'm not sure the Unicode values for English characters are the same as the ASCII values.

I see. That certainly makes sense now, thanks to you and echicken.

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Re: Encoding
By: echicken to Nightfox on Sat Dec 08 2018 01:30 pm

In this case a Mac was using some fancy apostrophes or something which were encoded into two or more bytes. Terminals expecting CP437 showed several characters in place of the intended one.

I seem to remember seeing Macs do that sometimes.

Nightfox

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Re: Encoding
By: MRO to Chai on Sat Dec 08 2018 11:53 am

i'm surprised someone is even using the web browser for regular msg base use. the web interface msg system is pretty limited, i thought. i havent looked in a year or so.

ecweb v4 is pretty decent, IMO. It looks somewhat similar to other web message forum software packages.

Nightfox

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Re: Encoding
By: Nightfox to Chai on Sat Dec 08 2018 12:28 am

Re: Encoding
By: Chai to Nightfox on Fri Dec 07 2018 11:33 pm

I noticed something similar from my messages when I did a few backreads via the BBS. It was obviously the text editor that was the culprit. As far as I recall, my text editor was using Unicode. I thought Unicode was backwards compatible with ASCII. As long as you're using an English keyboard, the codes are supposed to be identical?

I'm not sure. I know ASCII uses 8-bit (or 7-bit?) values, and Unicode uses 16-bit values.

The most popular encoding of Unicode today is UTF-8 which uses variable-length encoding of characters (with a minimum bit-width of 8).

I'm not sure the Unicode values for English characters are
the same as the ASCII values.

They are. And the basic symbols are as well, but it seems some browers don't send the normal apostrophe code for single-quote, but some other non-ASCII-equivalent code.

digital man

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Re: Encoding
By: Nightfox to MRO on Sat Dec 08 2018 12:25 pm

Re: Encoding
By: MRO to Chai on Sat Dec 08 2018 11:53 am

i'm surprised someone is even using the web browser for regular msg base use. the web interface msg system is pretty limited, i thought. i havent looked in a year or so.

ecweb v4 is pretty decent, IMO. It looks somewhat similar to other web message forum software packages.

i looked at it, lots of improvements. i still prefer reading on a bbs. seems faster to newscan and reply.
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Re: Encoding
By: Chai to Nightfox on Fri Dec 07 2018 11:33 pm

Re: Re: Qemu for DOS doors?
By: Nightfox to Kirkman on Wed Dec 05 2018 05:43 pm

i'm surprised someone is even using the web browser for regular msg base use. the web interface msg system is pretty limited, i thought. i havent looked in a year or so.

I'm lazy I guess, I use the Nightshade web interface for messages :-P

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