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

[Peter van der Goes]

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?

----- Original Message -----
From: <xitami-request@lists.xitami.org>
To: <xitami@lists.xitami.org>
Sent: Monday, October 14, 2002 5:01 AM
Subject: Xitami digest, Vol 1 #502 - 1 msg


> Send Xitami mailing list submissions to
> xitami@lists.xitami.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> http://lists.xitami.org/mailman/listinfo/xitami
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> xitami-request@lists.xitami.org
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> xitami-admin@lists.xitami.org
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of Xitami digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Re: Xitami, ActivePerl CGI Scripts Not Working (Brian {Hamilton
Kelly})
>
> --__--__--
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 17:39:16 +0100
> From: bhk@dsl.co.uk (Brian {Hamilton Kelly})
> To: xitami@lists.xitami.org
> Subject: Re: [Xitami] Xitami, ActivePerl CGI Scripts Not Working
> Reply-To: xitami@lists.xitami.org
>
> [Following up to a long-dead thread, because (SFAICS) no one bothered to
> explain what Patricko had been seeing]
>
> [Also re-ordering the posts so as to provide meaningful chronological
> context to question and answer]
>
> In message <017501c2623e$4260cdd0$5fab4044@PATRICKO> "Patricko" writes:
>
> > "Peter van der Goes" <pvdg@worldnet.att.net> wrote on
> > Sunday, September 22, 2002 6:24 AM:
> > >
> > >
> > > > Please tell me what 3D stuff you are referring to?
> > > >
> >
> > This is what is showing in the Xitmai archives
> >
> > <html>
> > <head>
> >  <title>Animal</title>
> > </head>
> > <body>
> > <form action=3D"animal.cgi" METHOD=3DPOST>
> > Which animal? <INPUT type=3D"text" name=3D"animal">
> > <P><INPUT type=3D"submit">
>
> [snip further examples of the occurrence of "3D"]
>
> The above stems from someone having used "quoted-printable" format when
> making a posting, and for the archiving software being ignorant of this
> format, and including the content verbatim.
>
> Quoted-printable is sometimes used by some mailers when a character is
> required in the text that is not "seven-bit clean" (the relevant
> standards for e-mail on the Internet explicitly state that the content of
> messages shall consist ONLY of the characters in the SEVEN-bit ASCII
> character set, although extensions exist to handle, e.g., characters with
> the eighth bit set high).  One of these extension mechanisms is the very
> crude quoted-printable format; use of this format is generally
> deprecated.
>
> So such characters are sent by their equivalent hexadecimal code for the
> two nibbles in the octet, preceded by an equals sign.  Thus the code for
> the British "pound sign" might appear as =A3, since this character has
> the code 0xA3 (or 163 in decimal)[1].  Since the equals character is
> hijacked under this mechanism to introduce such triglyph codes for a
> single character, then occurrences of the equals sign itself will appear
> encoded, as =3D, since 0x3d or decimal 61 is the ASCII code for the
> equals sign.  (Messages in quoted-printable will sometimes also have =20
> appearing at the ends of lines, to indicate that there is actually a
> space character present there before the end-of-line.)
>
> You'll note that this mail does NOT have the requisite MIME header to
> indicate that quoted-printable characters appear herein, and therefore
> everyone's mail-readers /ought/ to see the actual triglyph sequences
> themselves, rather than the character which each sequence represents.
>
> [1] Well, that's the code in a widely-used codepage associated with
> Windows Latin-1 alphabet.  For those of us that use CP437 or CP850, we
> see a lowercase-letter-u-with-acute-accent, but that's just another of
> the vagaries of Windows software assuming that everyone is using it, and
> not including the other requisite headers to permit of automatic
> translation at the recipent's computer.
> --
> Brian {Hamilton Kelly}
bhk@dsl.co.uk
>     "We have gone from a world of concentrated knowledge and wisdom to one
of
>     distributed ignorance.  And we know and understand less while being
incr-
>     easingly capable."              Prof. Peter Cochrane, formerly of BT
Labs
>
>
> --__--__--
>
>
> --
> Xitami Users Mailing List -- Digest Version
> To unsubscribe: http://lists.xitami.org/mailman/listinfo/xitami
>
> End of Xitami Digest
>