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Eric Thomas <ERIC@FRECP11>
Sat, 10 Oct 1987 13:56 SET
text/plain (21 lines)
Yes  Mark. But  you should  be aware  of the  fact that  some of  the national
character set  letters (accented characters, exclamation  point, double quote,
square  brackets,  etc  -  characters  which don't  exist  in  all  languages,
according to IBM's  own private conception of foreign languages)  are coded as
control characters.  I had trouble explaining  to a student why  he should not
sign up with  an "i trema" in his  name, but with a regular "i".  He could not
understand why  this i  trema could  hang up a  PC 3270  emulator, and  why it
wouldn't display properly since the PC does have this character.
 
More seriously,  I could modify LSV822TO  to quote these characters.  But what
the heck *is*  an ASCII control character in EBCDIC?  :-( This stupid standard
should have said "nonprintable character" or something like that. What are the
EBCDIC codes  I should quote?  X'00'-X'3F' can probably be  considered control
characters, but what  about all the stuff between  I and J, R and  S, etc? :-(
That's  where IBM  puts the  accents  usually. Wouldn't  it be  safer to  just
translate all the 00-3F range to blanks? I'm wondering what a gateway might do
to these  characters when bringing them  into an ASCII world,  and wouldn't be
surprised to see them turned into something making the mailfile invalid.
 
  Eric

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