Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 07/07/2005 23:02, Karl Randolph wrote:

> Peter:
>
> This is weird. I just checked the source code in the B-Hebrew archives for my 
> original message that started this thread, and found that somewhere the 
> coding was changed. I wrote in Hebrew, when it went through your mail program 
> and back to me it was still correctly coded, as I still saw Hebrew. However, 
> in the b-hebrew archive, it is coded as follows:
>
> YXD יחד
>
> (if it doesn’t show up correctly, the string is an ampersand followed by amp with a semicolon, then a hash with four numbers and semicolon, three times all as one string. Or to break it out, 
> & amp ; # 1497 ; & amp ; # 1495 ; & amp ; # 1491 ; )
>
> The addition of amp; after each & breaks it out from being a coding for a 
> letter to a text string. Does anyone have any idea where it came from? How can we 
> prevent it in the future? When you replied to me directly, it was not there so 
> the letters appeared correctly and when you sent me your example they were coded 
> correctly.
>  

I know exactly where this happened: inside your webmail program. This 
would have been the right thing for the program to do if the message had 
been an HTML message, because these are valid HTML encodings of Hebrew 
letters. But it is not the right thing to do in plain text e-mail - and 
this list accepts only plain text e-mail. However, your webmail program 
also reads plain text as if it were HTML, and so converts the HTML 
encoded forms back into Hebrew letters. But the archiving program and my 
mail program both treat plain text as plain text and so display the code.

The only sure way to prevent this is to use a proper standards-compliant 
mail program. But the problem might be partly solved if you sent your 
messages to this list in Windows-1255 encoding, or probably better still 
UTF-8.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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