%20Storage%20for%201/2"%20open%20reel%20tape

[Fred Cisin]

>>> 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".