Re: [MacPerl] Reading PC files

[Matthew Langford <langfml [at] eng [dot] auburn [dot] edu>]

On Thu, 23 Jul 1998, Rich Morin wrote:

> At 09:07 -0700 7/23/98, Bart Lateur wrote:
> >p.s. There are other differences between Mac files and PC files, too:
> >the "accented characters" (Ascii code above 128) are different. But they
> >differ between DOS and Windows, too. In plain English, this difference
> >is irrelevant.
> 
> Erm.  SOME of the "8-bit" characters turn into reasonable equivalents
> when printed with the 8th bit stripped.  OTOH, many do not.  It is NOT
> safe to assume, in general, that 01XX will print anything like 03XX ...


True.  I think the original poster (Bart Lateur) meant that the high-bit
characters weren't used in plain English (and certainly not in portable
Perl).  In programming practice, this means ignore this case until it
actually occurs, and then convert that letter by hand.

This is true even outside the Perl community.  I often get press releases
or email with ever-so-few characters messed up.  The characters messed up
are usually the fancy quotes, em- or en- dashes, or similar characters. 
>From PC users, the letters most often mangled for me are (forward or
backward?) tick-over-e as in saute and resume, and the degree symbol.
 YMMV.  

Often the culprits are Mac users. I suspect this is because the Mac has
more consistently supported the "fancies," or because someone read "The
Mac Is Not a Typewriter," or because Microsoft Word had a feature to
automatically use these characters.  Although I'm reading the email on a
Mac, I'm reading it by telnet into a Unix box--so it still gets mangled.

In the discussion a while back on cool Mac matching braces, for example, I
didn't see the "cool" letters.  All I saw was gibberish.  "No accounting
for taste," I thought.  :)  At least until someone converted the symbols
to descriptive English prose. 


--
MattLangford 


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