Chinese character test

[Joel S. Berson]

At 3/2/2008 01:59 PM, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>>>?j?a��A?n!
>>I got gibberish. But that's because of my obsolete E-mail client, which
>>I have now replaced with a Unicode-compatible program.
>>
>>Now I can read all my Russian and Chinese spam! ... well, at least
>>perceive the words.
>>
>>The character test worked OK according to the ADS-L on-line record:
>>
>>http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0803a&L=ads-l&D=1&F=&S=&P=1995
>>
>>
>>Let's see whether this will fly:
>It didn't fly. It was Unicode. I can send and receive Unicode but the
>ADS server apparently cannot or will not use it ... apparently the
>server can handle Big5 encoding, but I don't have a convenient way to
>input Big5 AFAIK, and I suppose others may not either. Maybe I'm missing
>something important again.
>
>I hope someone better informed can comment. Surely in this modern era
>the server should be able to deal with Unicode?

It may be that at the present time most list
servers and email clients can only recognize that
subset of Unicode (subset of UTF-8 in particular)
that corresponds to "8-bit ASCII" (ISO-8859.1) --
so-called "Western European".  It may also be
that support for a larger character set
(providing Chinese, Japanese, Korean) must be
installed in one's operating system.  But I cannot speak definitively.

Joel

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