Re: Admin: a suggestion on the script corruption problem.
Re: Admin: a suggestion on the script corruption problem.
- Subject: Re: Admin: a suggestion on the script corruption problem.
- From: Chuq Von Rospach <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 10:56:17 -0800
On 2/16/01 10:32 AM, "JollyRoger" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
Should we go the "readable post" route, where the encoded script is made
>
readable by the encoding tool, and the decoding tool converts it from
>
readable form to usable form?
I'd go readable -- because you don't want to get away from being able to
discuss the code fragments as well as pass them around. A block of code
bytes is hard to illuminate with commentary.
>
This route seems problematic to me, because
>
we'd have to come up with an algorithm that would take into account every
>
single character and combination of characters that might get mangled by the
>
server. That's going to be a big job if you want to do it right.
Not really. Take all non-ascii characters, and convert them into an ascii
string of \nnn, where nnn is their octal equivalent. Convert all \ in the
script to \\. When you decode, convert \\ to \, and convert \nnn back into
the equivalent character. And this would be machine independent, too, since
you could easily write scripts for non-Apple machines if you wanted -- we
need to remember some folks read the list on Unix and windows boxes, even if
they're programming Macs. That's one of the glitches the whole "fix the
character set" issue has to deal with, and why it's not a slam dunk. It can
be fixed -- but it's not as easy to fix going multi-platform, like my
servers have to. Especially if the fix has to roll to all of the lists on
the server. I can't break other stuff to fix this. That's what makes it an
interesting challenge -- fixing it is one thing, fixing it while
guaranteeing I don't simply move the bug into someone else's lap takes time.
--
Chuq Von Rospach, Apple Mail List Gnome
(
mailto:email@hidden) + (
mailto:email@hidden)