luria@techunix.BITNET (Marc Luria) (04/12/89)
Basically, the text is subtly changed. I'm sending from a UNIX Vax in Berkeley to a Sun4 in Israel over Bitnet. These changes are not crucial for a letter, but when I want to send a real file it is a big problem. For example if I want to send a tar file, and first uuencode it, I can't uudecode it on the other side. I've heard this is because Bitnet translates stuff from ASCII to EBCDIC, and certain characters all map onto one character, so the retranslation is bad. First of all, can someone explain the problem more clearly? Secondly, does anyone have a solution? It seems to me that if the problem is deterministic, i.e. one knew which characters were problematic, one could write to filter to encode those characters, and then decode them on the other side. Does anyone have such a filter? Thanks in advance. Marc Luria luria@techsel.bitnet luria@renoir.berkeley.edu