Unknown code page

[Bob Hairgrove]

Hello,

Does anyone know offhand which single-byte code page maps the German
Umlaut character "ä" to hexadecimal 8A?

Or does anyone have a URL handy to look up such things?

Thanks.

 

[Andreas Prilop]

X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.21/32.243

When writing on such a subject, you should really use a newsreader
that is capable to declare the encoding ("charset") in messages.
Get version 1.93!

Does anyone know offhand which single-byte code page maps the German
Umlaut character "?" to hexadecimal 8A?

In <http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/ROMAN.TXT> ,
character x8A is "a with diaeresis" (ä).

 

[Bob Hairgrove]

When writing on such a subject, you should really use a newsreader
that is capable to declare the encoding ("charset") in messages.
Get version 1.93!

The problem is irrelevant to my newsreader. We are encountering these
problems at work where we are decompressing binary data stored in 2D
barcodes and storing the result in XML files. Within the data itself,
there is no indication of the code page, and we get the data from a
variety of systems, from a scan workflow, the internet, etc. It's
pretty wild.

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

When writing on such a subject, you should really use a newsreader
that is capable to declare the encoding ("charset") in messages.

[..]
The problem is irrelevant to my newsreader.

If you're going to post to usenet, then I'd say Andreas offered good
advice about doing it. And particularly if you're posting about
character coding problems.

As we see, this shortcoming _was_ relevant to your description of the
problem, even if it wasn't relevant to the problem itself:

Communication failed.

 

[Bob Hairgrove]

When writing on such a subject, you should really use a newsreader
that is capable to declare the encoding ("charset") in messages.

[..]
The problem is irrelevant to my newsreader.

If you're going to post to usenet, then I'd say Andreas offered good
advice about doing it. And particularly if you're posting about
character coding problems.

As we see, this shortcoming _was_ relevant to your description of the
problem, even if it wasn't relevant to the problem itself:

Communication failed.

I see what you mean now ... Funny, though, Google shows the character
correctly.

It's time everyone moved to Unicode, I suppose!

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

I see what you mean now ...
Thanks...

Funny, though, Google shows the character correctly.

Since there was no character coding defined, there -is- no independent
definition of correctness. I think you really meant "Google made the
right guess at what you meant", but Andreas (or rather, his software
;-) is more fastidious, and refused to guess.

It's time everyone moved to Unicode, I suppose!

With utf-8, you get a new form of excitement: if the octet-stream
isn't valid utf-8, then it's forbidden to guess - the specification
mandates the reporting of an error.

cheers

 

[Patrick TJ McPhee]

% Or does anyone have a URL handy to look up such things?

There's an RFC that lists a large number of character sets. I don't know
the number off-hand, but a copy is included with the source for recode.

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

% Or does anyone have a URL handy to look up such things?

There's an RFC that lists a large number of character sets.

Yes, but for practical purposes I would nowadays generally
recommend the cross-mapping tables at the Unicode site.
http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/

 

[Andreas Prilop]

There's an RFC that lists a large number of character sets. I don't know
the number off-hand, but a copy is included with the source for recode.

Do you mean <http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets> ?

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

Do you mean <http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets> ?

Could it have been a reference to RFC1345 ? - that's pretty
historical now, but it is indeed cited in the recode
documentation, so maybe that's the one that was meant.

 

[Patrick TJ McPhee]

%
% > There's an RFC that lists a large number of character sets. I don't know
% > the number off-hand, but a copy is included with the source for recode.
%
% Do you mean <http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets> ?

No, I meant the first reference, RFC 1345.