Re: XyWin and Email

[Carl Distefano cldxtra@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to note from Paul Williams  Sat, 24 Jun
2000 08:11:10 +0200

-> >SMTP, POP3, MIME -- all of the governing standards are very
-> well defined; no ambiguity about it.
->
-> Where??? That's exactly what I am trying to understand. Anf why
-> do you sometimes get % or = signs

Internet standards are defined in documents called RFCs (Requests for
Comment), which are available many places on the Net. See, e.g.:
http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Standards/RFCs/.
(They're heavy slogging -- essential if you're planning to write
software, but not for the casual user.)

The equal signs that pepper many mail messages signify "quoted-
printable" encoding. Quoted-printable is one of the two MIME methods
(the other is Base64) to encode mail messages that don't consist
entirely of plain text (Ascii 32-127). Typically, quoted-printable is
used to encode all or part of the message *body*, while Base64 is used
for binary *attachments*. Encoding is necessary to prevent corruption
as the messages bounce from server to server on the Internet; many
such servers can only handle plain text. In quoted-printable
encoding, a character is encoded, or "quoted", by putting an equal
sign followed by the two-digit hexadecimal number representing its
Ascii code. For example, the Ascii-174 and -175 guillemets familiar
to XyWriters become, respectively, "=AE" and "=AF" (AE and AF being
the hex equivalents of 174 and 175). The =20 that you often see is
nothing more than an Ascii-32 blank space (20 base 16 = 32 base 10).

The Jumbo U2 has quoted-printable encode and decode modules written
(by me) entirely in XPL. You just DeFine encoded mater and issue
QPD. The example in your message

=20N=B0=2036=20-=20lundi=2026=20juin=202000****=20QUOI=20DE=20=
NEUF=20DANS=20LE=20VOYAGE=20?=20**

is mostly plain text and decodes to:

 N° 36 - lundi 26 juin 2000**** QUOI DE NEUF DANS LE VOYAGE ? **

(The 3rd char above, an Ascii-176, may not survive the trip to your
desktop.)

In URLs (Web addresses), non-printable chars are encoded similarly,
except that a percent sign (%) is used instead of the equals sign.

--------------
Carl Distefano
CLDistefano@xxxxxxxx
http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/