Subj : CP850 (I think)
To   : Ozz Nixon
From : Maurice Kinal
Date : Thu Apr 25 2019 12:00:14

Hey Ozz!

 ON> Well, I am attacking it the other way around ... I am using
 ON> TRichEdit.com's Editor component - which is UTF8 only now.

Can it count multibyte characters properly?  I've been seeing too many utf8 
apps that can't, especially on web based BBSes.

 ON> Yeah, we could do it like Email and NNTP headers vs bodies - but,
 ON> then it wouldn't be fidonet, it would be Internet. ;-)

I've never cared much for email.  Besides eliminating binary in headers has 
nothing to do with the internet.  It is file formatting and has been going on 
for longer than the internet has been in existance.

 ON> noone wanted to give up having the messages on their local system

That doesn't surprise me.

 ON> Do you know in CP850/CP855 - the highbit characters for drawing
 ON> boxes - is it the double line or single line version that is
 ON> missing elements?

No I don't but I was planning to check CP866 and cross-reference that to the 
CP437 table I have now that I believe I have that properly cased.  :::knock on 
wood:::  I've asked around in the past but nobody seems to want to go out on a 
limb over it and I assumed that since they are all IBM the graphical characters 
would indeed match up.

 ON> If Copy(Ws,1,3)=#239#187#191 then ... it's UTF8 encoded (be it
 ON> message, source, web, text file).

That's an old school MS idea which can safely be ignored as far as utf8 is 
concerned.  For utf16 it might matter especially for big and little endian 
systems.  To be honest I had forgotten completely about that but it doesn't 
harm anything if there.  I have run across it in fidonet messages in the past.

 ON> Not sure if everyone's Linux does that - but every machine I
 ON> have contains those 3 bytes its a UTF8 stream.

Let me guess, Windows machines?  Anyhow for utf8 it makes no difference but 
some MS apps might disagree, especially utf16 ones.  Anyhow I still haven't run 
across a linux utf8 app that uses it but it probably doesn't hurt anything if 
it exists.

Life is good,
Maurice

.... Don't cry for me I have vi.
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 * Origin: Little Mikey's Brain - Ladysmith BC, Canada (1:153/7001)

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