Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!ut-sally!husc6!cmcl2!brl-adm!umd5!hans From: hans@umd5.umd.edu (Hans Breitenlohner) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st Subject: Re: UUENCODED files - corruption over BITNET Message-ID: <1791@umd5.umd.edu> Date: Wed, 15-Jul-87 16:29:22 EDT Article-I.D.: umd5.1791 Posted: Wed Jul 15 16:29:22 1987 Date-Received: Fri, 17-Jul-87 07:29:40 EDT References: <159@lithium.UUCP> Reply-To: hans@umd5.umd.edu (Hans Breitenlohner) Organization: University of Maryland, College Park Lines: 32 In article <159@lithium.UUCP> andrew@lithium.UUCP (Andrew B Smith) writes: >Could someone tell me the character changes that occure when a UUENCODED >file is sent through an IBM host on BITNET (I think ~ is one). UUENCODE uses the ASCII characters with values o40 to o137, or o41 to o140 in the case of some recent versions. Unfortunately not all of these have a (unique) representation in EBCDIC. As a result some of these get trashed when ASCII to EBCDIC translation is done on a host different from the one doing EBCDIC to ASCII. (I will assume that all hosts have their act together sufficiently to give correct results when translating both ways themselves, but even that is not always true). The following characters are affected frequently: Left and right (square) brackets -- if you are lucky they will turn into left and right braces. Caret sometimes turns into tilde. Backslash and accent grave have standard EBCDIC representation, but are not on most IBM print chains / fonts / whatever they keep characters on these days. As a result, the corresponding translate tables may also not be debugged. All but the shortest UUENCODED files have several occurrences of all the characters from o40 to o137 (or o41 to o140). Look at them with your favorite editor, and you may be able to figure out what substitutions were made. If the file is preceded by a copy of the ASCII alphabet then this job is considerably simpler. Finally, these hosts may also truncate lines with trailing blanks, and some UUDECODEs can not deal with truncated lines. Again, your favorite text editor should be able to help you out. Sorry if some of this is more vague than what you had hoped for, but such is the nature of the beast.