Re: Listserv chars (was Re: Removing items from a list)
Re: Listserv chars (was Re: Removing items from a list)
- Subject: Re: Listserv chars (was Re: Removing items from a list)
- From: BJ Terry <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 6 Mar 2004 22:17:39 -0800
On Mar 6, 2004, at 7:25 PM, Walter Ian Kaye wrote:
At 06:26p -0800 03/06/2004, Michael Terry didst inscribe upon an
electronic papyrus:
On Mar 6, 2004, at 5:08 PM, Steve Meyer wrote:
Regarding your 'Curious' section below - I'm not sure what point
you're making(?)
Heh. Sorry, I wasn't making a point--it was just a test. Should have
been more clear about that. I was hoping no one would notice since it
was below my signature. Anyway, it was all the characters from the
MacRoman character set. I wanted to know what the list server would
do to them.
And now that you know, shall we do a more explicit test?
Perhaps in lines of 32 rather than 50, in 8-char groups? ...
There's nothing really special going on here, the listserver simply
removes the 8th bit, causing everything to turn into nice, standard,
7-bit ASCII.
!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?
@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopq
rstuvwxyz{|}~
!"#
$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTU
VWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~
Each line of characters is supposed to be 50 characters long. When the
applescript used to produce it is run, you'll see that the oddest
lines, which, on the list server, start with "r" and end with "#",
corresponds to 50 characters when taken in MacRoman. When the 8th-bit
is removed from these characters, though, most become simply invisible
control characters. 3 of them add new lines, ASCII characters 10 (LF),
11 (vertical tab), and 13 (CR). When the characters pass the mark of
160 (128 + 32) they again form the visible ascii characters in order.
That another return occurs after the # is merely an incident of the
script used to generate the above text. Here's a script which
demonstrates the list server's behaviour. The top part generates the
table seen above, the rest strips 8th bits:
set Table to ""
repeat with i from 0 to 255
set Table to Table & (ASCII character i)
if Table's last paragraph's length = 50 then set Table to Table &
return
end repeat
repeat with i from 1 to 256
set q to ((ASCII number (item i of Table)) mod 128)
if (ASCII number (item i of Table)) > 127 then
set Table to (items 1 thru (i - 1) of Table) & (ASCII character
((ASCII number (item i of Table)) mod 128)) & (items from (i + 1) to -1
of Table)
end if
end repeat
set my text item delimiters to ""
set Table to Table as string
return Table
There's a bug in this script when it gets to the end, but it isn't
really important to our discussion, so I've not bothered to fix it.
Perhaps it would be better if the list-server simply supported UTF-8 or
something, then we could use the whole Unicode character set.
BJ Terry
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