andrew@lithium.UUCP (Andrew B Smith) (07/01/87)
Hi, Could someone tell me the character changes that occure when a UUENCODED file is sent through an IBM host on BITNET (I think ~ is one). Thank you, Andrew ------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Andrew B Smith | UUCP: andrew@kcl-cs.UUCP Dept. of Computing, | JANET: UDAC041@UK.AC.KCL.CC.VAXA King's College London, | BITNET, The Strand, | EARN: UDAC041%VAXA.CC.KCL.AC.UK@UKACRL.BITNET LONDON WC2R 2LS | United Kingdom | TPHONE: 01-836-5454 ext: 2239 | ------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Andrew B Smith | UUCP: andrew@kcl-cs.UUCP Dept. of Computing, | JANET: UDAC041@UK.AC.KCL.CC.VAXA King's College London, | BITNET, The Strand, | EARN: UDAC041%VAXA.CC.KCL.AC.UK@UKACRL.BITNET LONDON WC2R 2LS | United Kingdom | TPHONE: 01-836-5454 ext: 2239 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------
hans@umd5.umd.edu (Hans Breitenlohner) (07/15/87)
In article <159@lithium.UUCP> andrew@lithium.UUCP (Andrew B Smith) writes: >Could someone tell me the character changes that occure when a UUENCODED >file is sent through an IBM host on BITNET (I think ~ is one). UUENCODE uses the ASCII characters with values o40 to o137, or o41 to o140 in the case of some recent versions. Unfortunately not all of these have a (unique) representation in EBCDIC. As a result some of these get trashed when ASCII to EBCDIC translation is done on a host different from the one doing EBCDIC to ASCII. (I will assume that all hosts have their act together sufficiently to give correct results when translating both ways themselves, but even that is not always true). The following characters are affected frequently: Left and right (square) brackets -- if you are lucky they will turn into left and right braces. Caret sometimes turns into tilde. Backslash and accent grave have standard EBCDIC representation, but are not on most IBM print chains / fonts / whatever they keep characters on these days. As a result, the corresponding translate tables may also not be debugged. All but the shortest UUENCODED files have several occurrences of all the characters from o40 to o137 (or o41 to o140). Look at them with your favorite editor, and you may be able to figure out what substitutions were made. If the file is preceded by a copy of the ASCII alphabet then this job is considerably simpler. Finally, these hosts may also truncate lines with trailing blanks, and some UUDECODEs can not deal with truncated lines. Again, your favorite text editor should be able to help you out. Sorry if some of this is more vague than what you had hoped for, but such is the nature of the beast.
jmg@cernvax.UUCP (jmg) (07/16/87)
In article <1791@umd5.umd.edu> hans@umd5.umd.edu (Hans Breitenlohner) writes: >In article <159@lithium.UUCP> andrew@lithium.UUCP (Andrew B Smith) writes: >The following characters are affected frequently: > Caret sometimes turns into tilde. In the copy of CAP sent directly to me, caret got changed to colon. Since colon already exists in the character set, even the Dumas uudecode has problems!!!!! (the copy that came in comp.sys.atari.st was OK)
mike@yetti.UUCP (Mike Clarkson ) (07/18/87)
I just received a few files over BITNET from Europe, all ASCII text files (c code to be specific). The following characters were munged -> Left square bracket to lower case c Right square bracket to exclamation mark Exclamation mark to vertical bar Vertical bar to \347 octal. Heaven help your uuencoded files. If you see any of this happen, let your postmaster know. It is important to try and track these munger-*uckers down! -- Mike Clarkson, ...!allegra \ BITNET: mike@YUYETTI or CRESS, York University, ...!decvax \ SYMALG@YUSOL 4700 Keele Street, ...!ihnp4 > !utzoo!yetti!mike North York, Ontario, ...!linus / CANADA M3J 1P3. ...!watmath / Phone: +1 (416) 736-2100 x 7767 "...the most inevitable business communications system on the planet." - ROLM magazine advertisement which planet?