Character encoding

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Oleg Pashuk wrote:

> OOPS. Something went wrong as I was sending the reply. I was able to 
> decode the numbers but after I sent an e-mail, it become all ?????
> In any case, use Universal online Cyrillic Decoder at 
> <http://2cyr.com/decode/?lang=en>

That will always happen if you send anything but ASCII in a seven-bit 
encoding, as you did. I don't use OE, so I don't know what the options 
are, but I've seen this often enough to know it's a weak spot in the 
program. Somehow many intelligent users are tricked or fooled into 
sending Cyrillic as ASCII.

FWIW, I hear all these awful stories from people who can't read Cyrillic 
on this list, and I believe them, but that's not my experience. Unless 
it's been irreparably damaged by conversion to question marks, I can 
read every encoding you throw my way. It's that way with SeaMonkey 
today, and it was that way with Mozilla last year, and it was that way 
with Netscape 4.7 when I joined SEELANGS "way back in the late fifties."

I suspect there's a problem when the digest is assembled, because the 
system doesn't seem to know how to combine messages with different 
encodings. Whichever it chooses, the rest turn to hash. There should be 
a way to program it so that doesn't happen, but I don't know how. And 
until the day comes when EVERYone sends EVERY message in Unicode, the 
system will always have to combine messages with different encodings.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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