Every now and then, documentation in source code requires an ASCII table. Sometimes table cells are spanning multiple rows or/and column.
TL;DR: The tools I tried did not support that, so manual labour is still needed.
Archive for the ‘Encoding’ Category
Generating ASCII-tables with spanning cells: manual labour still needed
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/28
Posted in ASCII, ASCII art / AsciiArt, Development, Documentation Development, Encoding, Excel, Fun, HTML, Office, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | Tagged: 2 | Leave a Comment »
When you bump into Mojibake in your development, don’t use table-based solutions to solve it
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/14
A while ago I bumped into [Wayback/Archive] Unicode weirdness – VCL – Delphi-PRAXiS [en].
This sketched a mojibake problem where PDF to text converted files had odd looking character sequences.
The solution – replacing these sequences with more correctly looking text – worked at first, but then failed because the underlying source code got “corrected” from containing the Mojibake character sequences into the correct Unicode text.
A better solution is to figure out what series of encoding/decoding steps will give the correct text.
This is where – again – [Wayback/Archive] Home – ftfy: fixes text for you comes up: a still indispensable tool.
–jeroen
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Posted in Delphi, Development, Encoding, Mojibake, PDF, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
MIME decoder for Windows – Super User
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/17
More than 10 years ago, I needed a MIME decode for Windows as I was developing some software which implemented S/MIME could sign automatically generated emails and verify incoming ones.
I wrote more about the latter part in Some notes on OpenSSL, S/MIME, email, various RFC standards and their relations.
Now finally the post about what I wanted to schedule for posting back then as well: my question looking for a [Wayback/Archive] MIME decoder for Windows – Super User:
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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, base64, Development, Encoding, Linux, MIME, Power User, Software Development, Windows, WSL Windows Subsystem for Linux | Leave a Comment »
MacOS and Windows: sorting – Simple to enter Unicode character that would sort after Z in most cases? – Stack Overflow
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/10
TL;DR: There is no simple character that works on both MacOS and Windows.
[Wayback/Archive] sorting – Simple to enter Unicode character that would sort after Z in most cases? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] sorin and [Wayback/Archive] degenerate):
A
On Windows, none of these options work because they all sort before
A.A solution I ended up using is an Arabic character:
ٴ This folder comes after
zin windows
According to [Wayback/Archive] What Unicode character is this ?, the above mentioned character is U+0674 : ARABIC LETTER HIGH HAMZA.
Note that on Windows the ٴ character displays at the start of the filename, but on MacOS in Finder it ends up behind the extension (as Arabic script is right-to-left) and is very hard to remove. On the MacOS Terminal it ends up on the left and is easy to modify.
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Posted in Apple, Encoding, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Unicode, Windows | Leave a Comment »
UTF-8, Explained Simply – YouTube
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/04
Cool interesting video: [Wayback/Archive] UTF-8, Explained Simply – YouTube
It covers both history from the late 1800s Baudot Code (also known as ITA1) via 1930s ITA2 and 1950’s EBCDIC / FIELDATA ages through 7-bit ASCII in the 1970s and incompatible UCS-2 (now UTF-16) of the 1990s to the current day and age of UTF-8 (which actually started out on a placemat in 1992).
Though mentioning 8-bit encoding, it skips details of extended ASCII encodings like ISO/IEC 8859 and Windows-1252.
It goes to quite some length on decoding UTF-8 and showing how forgiving the UTF-8 standard is. Yes, it is a self-synchronising code thanks to the venerable Ken Thompson.
Definitely worth watching as it also covers the Zero-width joiner which is not just important for combining Emoji, as it is used by many people nowadays, but got in fact implemented to support various scripts like Arabic script or any Indic script.
Oh, the placemat story: Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in ASCII, Development, EBCDIC, Encoding, ISO-8859, Software Development, UCS-2, Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-8, Windows-1252 | Leave a Comment »
Decoding HTML encoded source to XML text
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/03
For Some links on getting the most recent defragmentation time of a Windows volume I needed to copy back and forth some XML code back and forth between my ARM MacBook Pro to a remote Windows machine accessing via the Microsoft Windows App (the app formerly known as Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac).
The problem with that is the copying would lose line breaks, which for XML meaning is no problem, but for human understandability while editing the XML in the Event View query dialog was.
So I decided to go to the “Code” view in my Classic WordPress editor (did I ever tell you much I dislike – especially the accessibility of – the not so new but still haughty named Gutenberg editor?), copied the HTML encoded form and wanted to convert it to unencoded XML text.
Well, here I got to naming confusion land, on which I will talk further below, but first two of the potential solutions:
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Posted in Cyberchef, Development, Encoding, HTML, Mojibake, Software Development, URL Encoding, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Generating random strings for passwords and uuids/guids on both Windows and Linux using base64 and hex encoding, plus: “Hive Systems: Are Your Passwords in the Green?”
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/25
Often I need to generate passwords or uuids (on some systems called guids). I usually try to do that in a relatively platform agnostic way as I use MacOS, Windows and Linux in various mixes for many reasons (for instance that I have had developed quite hefty RSI in the early 1990s of the and the best keyboard/pointing-device combination for is the MacBook built in keyboard/touchpad combination so basically MacBooks are my window to all other operating systems).
Generating randomly with a good random number generator them makes sense as for most usage, it is important that both passwords and uuids are hard to guess which means having an entropy that is as high as possible.
A cool thing about OpenSSL is that:
- most of not all systems have it installed (it was no coincidence I published Installing OpenSSL on Windows a few days ago)
- it has a very good pseudo-random number generator and as of [Wayback/Archive] OpenSSL version 1.1.1 first released in 2018 has solved the problem around [Wayback/Archive] Random fork-safety – OpenSSLWiki, see [Wayback/Archive] Our Review of the OpenSSL 1.1.1 Random Number Generation Update – OSTIF.org.
- it supports various useful output formats
hex(hexadecimal) andbase64(next to the default of octet – or by today’s naming convention byte – output)
The easiest to generate are passwords. Yes I know that password managers can do this too, but there are some systems I cannot use them on or sync between them (don’t you love the corporate world) so my aim is to use a random password generator in a platform agnostic way which usage is easy to remember. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, base64, bash, bash, Batch-Files, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Encoding, Event, HEX encoding, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, MacBook, OpenSSL, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »
A 2D barcode on PostNL delivered packages can contain too much recipient information (via Security.NL and Tweakers.net): is this in the documented Data Matrix and who should fix this?
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/02/17
Yesterday, an important question appeared at almost the same time on Tweakers.net and Security.nl. It is about 2D barcodes on some packages delivered by PostNL. Some of these – I call them Data Matrix, as that is what they are – seem to include the e-mail address of the recipient.
The posts caused some uproar, and in order for myself to understand what is going on and what questions should be asked to PostNL, I wrote this blog post.
In any case: always remove parcel labels before disposing of the parcels, then destroy the labels. This has always been good privacy practice and will stay that way forever.
Regrettably, Tweakers.net blocks both the Wayback Machine and Archive Today, which makes their information ephemeral. Therefore I archived some of the Tweakers.net information in the gist [Wayback/Archive] “E-mailadres van ontvanger kan in PostNL barcode staan” archived from https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/2327530/0 · GitHub
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Posted in base64, Development, Encoding, Font, KIX Font PostNL, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
A few pfSense quirks I got used to over the years
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/01/06
Everytime when installing a pfSense router from scratch, I seem to re-learn a few of the below quirks. So it was finally time to document them (:
Quite a few of my pfSense configurations are just doing routing between various networks, should not provide DHCP leases and do not always need or have a WAN connected (i.e. they are LAN-only).
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Posted in Communications Development, Conference Topics, Conferences, Cyberchef, Development, DHCP, Encoding, Event, Hardware, HTTP, Internet protocol suite, MikroTik, Network-and-equipment, pfSense, Power User, routers, Software Development, SSH, TCP, TLS, UDP | Tagged: 8846 | Leave a Comment »
Cory LaViska: “ooh you can create intent links for Bluesky” — Bluesky
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/20
A longer while I ago, I could not find a URL that would bring up the BKSY post pop-up.
A while ago, I found out there is a compose intent URL: you can even add a text parameter with URL-encoded content!
[Wayback/Archive] Cory LaViska: “ooh you can create intent links for Bluesky” — Bluesky
[Wayback/Archive] bafkreig4tmnf44akrfnqvuvinsj6pkg4zsosu5uivwpgqypkpgree247xq@jpeg (1000×425)
The below queries revealed various other posts indicating the same:
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Posted in Development, Encoding, HTML, Software Development, URL Encoding, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 