On Sat, 5 Oct 2013 17:20:38 -0400, John Gilmore wrote: >Bill, > >What you sent as an extract from my text arrived as > >>Consider the botched French-language text >> >>A Montréal, a la fin des années 80, . . . >> >>It should of course be >> >>A Montréal, a la fin des années 80 . . . >> > >i.e., with good and bad text strings interchanged.
I'll take the blame for the second part being wrong. I replied to your original post using the listserv's web interface at https://listserv.ua.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=IBM-MAIN and when I told it to quote your message (clicking on the big double quote at the bottom), the result was that the pair of bytes that you used in the deliberately botched line (hex C3 and A9) were shown as the accented "e", having been interpreted as if they were UTF-8. The second representation of the line, which had the accented "e" in your original post, was now presented as a white question mark on a black diamond-shaped background, which is the Uncode Replacement Character U+FFFD as shown at http://www.charbase.com/fffd-unicode-replacement-character Anyone with access to the listserv's web interface (well, maybe not with all browsers and OSes) can see what I'm talking about by starting to reply to your original post, quoting it, and looking at how the quoted text has been transformed. Then back out without sending. I decided to correct the quoted text that the web interface had modified, but I got it backwards. I left the first line unchanged, when I should have replaced the accented "e" with the original pair of bytes, and I replaced the U+FFFD in the second text string with the original pair of bytes, when I should have used an accented "e". I should add that in quoting your reply for this post, which is supposed to show the good and bad text strings interchanged, the web interface, consistent in its perversity, now shows the first instance of the string with the U+FFFD, and the second instance with the accented "e". I have fixed up both instances before sending, so with luck it will show the text string interchanged, and it will be an accurate quote of your reply, with my mistake. Bill ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
