Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

At 10:33 PM 21/11/2018 -0500, ED SHARPE wrote: Ah ha! Mystery explained. I'm another who sees funny characters where Ed's mails contain "c2 a0". This is the UTF-8 encoding of a 'no-break space' character, which is NOT in the original ASCII set. See https://apps.timwhitlock.info/unicode/inspect/hex/c2/a0 I see them because I'm using an old email client - Eudora 3 (1997.) I stick with this specifically _because_ it doesn't understand UTF-8 or any other non-ASCII coding, especially in the header, and hence simply ignores any executables in the headers or email body. Which makes it totally virus proof, unlike Microsoft's intentionally open-backdoor junk like Outlook. And most other email 'modern wonders.' Eudora barely even understands html in emails, and I'm fine with that. Also I have it configured to dust-bin any incomimg mail containing UTF-8 chars in the Subject header. Avoids a lot of time-wasting. Anyway, I was wondering how Ed's emails (and sometimes others elsewhere) acquired that odd corruption. Answer: Ed's email util (AOL Mobile Mail, and probably various other 'content enhanced' email clients) interpret the user typing space twice in succession, as meaning "I really, really want there to be a space here, no matter what." So it inserts a 'no-break space' unicode character, which of course requires a 2-byte UTF-8 encoding. Then adds a plain ASCII space 0x20 just to be sure. Personally I find it more interesting than annoying. Just another example of the gradual chaotic devolution of ASCII, into a Babel of incompatible encodings. Not that ASCII was all that great in the first place. It's also interesting that even on cctalk, where you'd think everyone would be aware of the differences between ASCII and later 'extensions', low level coding schemes, and the desirability of sticking to common standards, some are not. Takeaway: Ed, one space is enough. I don't know how you got the idea people might miss seeing a single space, and so you need to type two or more. But it isn't so. The normal convention in plain text is one space character between each word. And since plain ASCII is hard-formatted, extra spaces are NOT ignored and make for wider spacing between words. Which looks very odd, even if your mail utility didn't try to do something 'special' with your unusual user input. Btw, I changed the subject line, because this is a wider topic. I've been meaning to start a conversation about the original evolution of ASCII, and various extensions. Related to a side project of mine. But first, I'm having a problem with some portion of cctalk posts going missing, ie I don't receive all messages. The ratio seems to vary day to day. Sometimes no obvious missing, sometimes a lot. Still don't know why, or how to fix this. Any suggestions? Guy