bobr (01/31/83)
I've been noticing recently a lot of net news coming here which contains some dollar amount which has been truncated to .00 or just 00, much to my annoyance. This censorship occurs frequently in noncommercial, strictly informative news items, so I should think that it would not be a problem for ARPA folks. Does anyone know where or why this is happening? Robert Reed, Tektronix ucbvax!teklabs!iddic!bobr
lou (02/01/83)
It looks like some machine somewhere is removing dollar signs and the character that follows each one. Does anyone know of a machine that uses the currency symbol as a meta-character and does that processing on news items? Perhaps it's one of the ARPA gateways. Lou Warshawsky General Instrument R&D Chandler, AZ
kaufman (02/04/83)
There was a discussion of this problem on net.news a while back - apparently the shell is swallowing metacharacters (in, e.g., inews -t "$100 ..." ...). The relevant article is net.news #538; watarts.1652 (does anybody know if net.news #538 is the same on all machines?). David Kaufman P.S. Do you have any idea how hard readnews makes it to go back and find an old article unless you know the newsgroup and number? I just went through a painful 15 minutes . . . .
geo (02/07/83)
The original article from Robert Reed of Tektronix asked why there are so many articles that contain what should obviously be prices, but all that remains is "00". I believe the problem is that the leading $[0-9] get interpreted by some intermediate programme. missing $[0-9] in Title: lines could be the result of the expansion of shell metacharacters. Missing $[0-9] in the body of articles could be the result of interpretation by nroff. I have yet to see an article with missing dollar signs that could not be explained this way. Be more careful guys. Cordially, Geo Swan, Integrated Studies, University of Waterloo