) I am the FAQ writer/maintainer for the Approach Users Mailing List FAQ
) Archive-name: databases/approach-mailing-list-faq/part1 and .../part2
) My FAQ is approved by the *.moderators and is posted monthly by the
) rtfm.mit.edu FAQ-Server.
) For some strange reason spurious characters are appearing in the FAQ it
) appeasr in the newsgroup. Eg. <<<<== SAVE THIS MESSAGE NOW ==>>>> appears as
) <<<<=3D=3D SAVE THIS MESSAGE NOW =3D=3D>>>>
) Now, 3D is hexidecimal for 61, which is the ASCII code for and equals sign
) '=' which is what is meant to be there. But what is making this change and
) why. I have checked it at an ASCII level on my computer, and the codes are
) not present when I send the FAQ to the FAQ server - the '=' signs are stored
) as a normal ASCII 61. But when it appears in the newsgroup the extra
) characters have been inserted.
) This occurs right throughout my FAQ whenever I use an '=' sign. In other
) parts of the FAQ there is a sprinkle of '=7F's too.
) Does anybody have any idea about why this happens and how I can stop it?
This is the wonderful scourge of modern email and news known as MIME
getting in your way. Your message is being processed using the
"quoted-printable" content-encoding. What this basically means is:
* Any non-printable characters or the equals sign are replaced with
=XX (where XX is the hex code for the character)
* Spaces at the end of a line are replaced with =20
* Lines greater than 70 or so characters are split, with an = where
the line was split.
The fact that = was chosen as the escape character is really
infuriating for reasons like you have seen. Using backslash (\) or
something similar would have been much more sensible (and standard),
but c'est la vie.
The good news is that most modern news/mail reading software should
automagically decode your message and put the = signs back. I would
suggest that you see if you can turn off the quoted-printable encoding
in your posting/mailing software for sending your FAQ, however.
--Bill.
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