[Xitami] Re: Xitami digest, Vol 1 #502 - 1 msg

[Thomas J. Hruska]

At 08:30 AM 10/14/2002 -0500, Peter van der Goes writeth:
>As I was the original poster of the script example which included the
>"3D"'s, I am very interested in this explanation. At the time, I thought the
>spurious characters had something to do with me posting in HTML. Long after
>the original incident, I discovered that all the example files from the
>original source were riddled with "solid black rectangle characters" (when
>viewed in Notepad) which had to be removed before the examples were usable
>in a Win 2000 environment.
>I suspect the mysterious appearance of the "3D"'s in my post and the
>rectangles in the original files are related somehow. The files came
>originally from a Perl book author's web site, and (I believe) were designed
>to be run on a Unix-based web server. Subsequent to all this, I have
>discovered that many other Perl authors provide separate script file
>downloads for Windows vs. Unix. When I use example scripts designated for
>Windows, I have no problems.
>A colleague and I have discovered that if the original files are run through
>a utility called Unix2DOS.com, then reversed through DOS2Unix.com, then
>reversed through Unix2DOS.com *again*, the offending characters are finally
>eradicated and the files are usable. I have also discovered that if these
>original files are opened in WordPad, then saved with File->SaveAs to force
>an overwrite, the resulting file is "cleansed" and usable on a Windows-based
>web server.
>I am relating all this in hopes of getting some practical insight on how the
>files' originator (the book author) could have avoided all this in the first
>place, as she appears to be as mystified by all this as I am. Should this
>author be offering two sets of files, one for Windows-based web servers, and
>the other for Unix-based web servers? Is there a better way?

Can I have a look at the original files?  Just send them to me off-list (I
only just started looking at this thread since I have only recently run
into problems like this).  I want to examine and see what problems there
are contained within.  If you want to, I would also like to see the
"cleansed" versions as well.  I will be able to provide a much better
explanation if I have the original files than if I did not.

Hope this helps!


          Thomas J. Hruska -- shinelight@shininglightpro.com
Shining Light Productions -- "Meeting the needs of fellow programmers"
                  http://www.shininglightpro.com/