>> whats with the weird tag on this thread?
> %20 is an escaped form of the space character. Some mail
> programs escape all control characters, or even anything
> like {} ~.
On Tue, 9 Apr 2019, Peter Coghlan via cctalk wrote:
Yes but "%20" is the form of escape intended
for use with http, not for email.
For email, it should be "=20" and if such escaped characters are included in a
subject line, this is supposed to be indicated by the subject field starting
with a sequence like "=?charset?Q?" to flag the use of what is called quoted
printable encoding.
It's due to the use of "standardized" character encoding.
ASCII, UTF-8, Unicode, . . .
"Standards are wonderful; everybody can have a unique one of their own."
I asked one of my classes to look up what "standard" means -
one student came up with a definitive answer: apparently it is a flag on
a tall pole. Any definitions having to do with conformation between
systems are now deprecated.
You mix that with an HTML browser program attempting to be an email
client, . . .
This particular sort of mess often occurs when somebody uses a character
that isn't part of the basic set.
The subject line mentioned half inch. SOME program "did a favor" for its
user, and changed "1 / 2" to a single character for one half.
And/or took the symmetrical character abreviation for inch, and changed
that, since "OBVIOUSLY, left, right, and center double quote characters
are not the same".