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From: ljdickey@water.UUCP (Lee Dickey)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: AUTOCOPY
Message-ID: <726@water.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 24-Dec-86 13:56:20 EST
Article-I.D.: water.726
Posted: Wed Dec 24 13:56:20 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 24-Dec-86 22:38:35 EST
References: <1819@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <674@bath63.ux63.bath.ac.uk>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 52

In article <674@bath63.ux63.bath.ac.uk>, pes@bath63.ux63.bath.ac.uk (Paul Smee) writes:

> The advantage of using ` is that (not being a space) it won't get stripped
> from the ends of lines....

> So, in summary, if you get a uuencoded file containing `s, turn them all
> into space chars.

I think that this is a dangerous suggestion, because some ASCII to EBCDIC
conversions get the caret (^), the grave accent (`) and the tilde (~) mixed
up.  I saw some files pass this way with lots of grave accents that had
started life as carets.

There are other solutions to the problem of blanks at the end of lines.

  (1)	If the lines are truncated, put some blanks in yourself. 
	It seems to matter not if you put in too many blanks.
	For example, this worked for me:
		"g/^M/s/$/       /"
	My uudecode program was not upset by the extra blanks
	that I put in at the end of the lines, and it got
	everything right.

  (2)	Put in some terminator at the end of every line before you
	transmit it.  Someone recently sent a file with an "a" at
	the end of every full line.  (A full line is one that 
	starts with an "M" and has at least 61 chars in it.) 
	I made two copies of this file, one with the "a" and
	one without, by doing something like this:
		"g/^M/s/a$//"
	The uudecode program produced the same result from both
	encoded files.


Neither of these solves the problem of multiple blanks being turned
to tab characters.  Are there any mailers that do this?
Perhaps a text editor might do that, maybe, but no file handlers, please.

Please do not deliberately introduce files with these non-UUencode
characters in them.  If you do, then the errors of conversion that I
mentioned above can not be corrected.

The solutions that you found may be fine for you to get around whatever
problems your text editor may have.  If they are, use them.  Locally.

But please keep them local and do not introduce them onto the net.

-- 
  Prof. L. J. Dickey, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo. 
	ljdickey@water.UUCP    ljdickey%water@waterloo.CSNET
 	ljdickey%water%waterloo.csnet@csnet-relay.ARPA
	ljdickey@watdcs.BITNET