On Wed 19 Mar, Margaret Morgan wrote:
> Help then somebody.
> Why do some communications have what appears to be a code
> for certain letters e.g. =94 etc. and why am I getting salary and other
> sterling amounts with a prefix A instead of # or stg, followed by a figure
> which is clearly not the correct one - usually 10 times more??
> This has not happened before - is it my end or the sender's?
>
We have had this point arise before (perhaps not on *this* Forum though)
The problem with the 'PoundSign' = "£" (how does your mail reader show
it?) is that the orriginal ASCII code table did not include it - Why have
a Pounds Sterling sign when everyone uses dollars ($)? The same applies to
accented characters and anything else that is not in the USA printable
"characters set" (Look at a manual for an old dot-matrix printer to get an
idea of what these are.)
As there is no standard to fall back on, each computer system or mailer
tries to solve the conversion problem differently.
If you get mail from a system that is the same as your own, or set up in
the same way, you *should* get the same answer - a pound sign or what
ever. If they are different it is a matter of luck!
For this reason I always use UKP (as in "UKP25.99 inc VAT") for money,
even on our WEB pages.
Technical note: My mail has the header:
>> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=ISO-8859-1
So if I write:
Téléphoné moi à l'ecole svp.
You should get the accents!
Other messages may have no Content-type header or this:
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
and come unstuck with anything non-(*US*)-standard.
Classic EXAMPLE:
My Daughter, studying French and German at Bradford, could not read the
French characters in messages from Paris (or from me at home) when they
arrived on her University machine. When the replies came back to us with
the french text quoted, the accents reappeared!
Like me, our friend in Paris used
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=ISO-8859-1
The university machine was set to
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Regards
Ted
--
. ___ . .._ . ._ _, **** Ted Pottage Dip SpLD (RSA) ****
| | _ |_||_ | |_)(_ *** CoPS Accredited Trainer ***
| | | ||_ |_ | ,_)
with dyslexia http://www.pottage.demon.co.uk/it-helps/
Chairman, BDA (British Dyslexia Association) Computer Committee
WEBmaster: http://www.bda-dyslexia.org.uk/ BDA: A1 at BETT'98 too.
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