Archive for the ‘ASCII’ Category
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/06/30
A long time ago (likely around 2009) I remember writing some code to re-encode text files in both Delphi and C#.
Somehow I thought I had published both, but I could only find parts of the C# code back in .NET/C# – converting UTF8 to ASCII (yes, you can loose information with this) using System.Text.Encoding.
So here are some links just in case I ever want to reproduce it in Delphi too (and a reminder to always perform this using TStream derivatives, never use TStrings or derivatives like TStringList for this):
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Posted in .NET, Ansi, ASCII, C#, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Mojibake, Software Development, UCS-2, UTF-16, UTF-32, UTF-8, UTF16, UTF32, UTF8, Windows-1252 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/28
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.
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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 »
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 »
Posted in ASCII, Development, EBCDIC, Encoding, ISO-8859, Software Development, UCS-2, Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-8, Windows-1252 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/13
While doing some ASCII art blog-post drafts cleanup, I bumped into the (now deleted) [Wayback/Archive] Best 404 page ever? : r/ProgrammerHumor which pointed to the (also now deleted).
I got there via my (not deleted!) blog post Why I like PlantUML.
So I dug up the old archived copy of that PlantUML 404-page and made gist out of it.
I soon realised this was all encoded stuff, seemingly a mix of a ROT13 variation and some other shifting around.
Luckily the original page mentioned in the Reddit post was way easier, so I put that in a gist too.
Bot are below the blog-signature. Enjoy!
Oh, and the full text of course above the signature:
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Posted in ASCII, ASCII art / AsciiArt, CSS, Development, Encoding, Fun, HTML, HTML5, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Scripting, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/09/01
Geocities is long dead, but luckily a lot has been archived: [Wayback] Archive.is: History of ASCII Art with a very comprehensive history ranging from ancient old hand painted art to contemporary computer made illustrations.
Via: [Wayback/Archive.is] ASCII art: The roots of ASCII art
--jeroen
Posted in ASCII, ASCII art / AsciiArt, Development, Encoding, Fun, History, Power User, Retrocomputing, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/06/09
Like me, [Archive.is] Kristian Köhntopp is a nerd.
Unlike me, Kris bumped into character encoding issues for just about all his digital life. That started about the same time as mine, but again unlike me: he was way more involved in the technical aspects of it.
First a series of Tweets:
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Posted in ASCII, C++, Development, Encoding, EPS/PostScript, Font, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Power User, Software Development, Times New Roman | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/15
From my Windows XP days (which are long gone), but historically relevant the answer to [Wayback] DELPHI : EEncodingError – Invalid code page on windows xp embedded – Stack Overflow by [Wayback] Remy Lebeau:
The TEncoding.ASCII property uses codepage 20127, which is not installed on XP Embedded by default. You have to install it manually. The TEncoding class does not exist in D2006.
Are you using Indy 10, by chance? It uses TEncoding.ASCII by default for its string encodings. This exact error has been known to occur when using Indy on XP Embedded.
–jeroen
Posted in ASCII, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Power User, Software Development, XP-embedded | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/09
Note: notepad cannot correctly guess the encoding, see the “old new thing”: [Wayback] Some files come up strange in Notepad | The Old New Thing (talking about ANSI a.k.a. Windows-1252, UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE, UTF-8, UTF-7 somewith and some without BOM as Notepad does not understand all permutations)
David Cumps discovered that certain text files come up strange in Notepad. The reason is that Notepad has to edit files in a variety of encodings, and when its back against the wall, sometimes it’s forced to guess.
[Wayback] C# Effective way to find any file’s Encoding – Stack Overflow shows how to detect various byte order marks in C#.
–jeroen
Posted in ASCII, Development, Encoding, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-32, UTF-8, UTF16, UTF32, UTF8 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2021/03/17
Most searches for “ASCII emoticons” get you Unicode ones:
Luckily most are ASCII in List of emoticons – Wikipedia.
There are also shortcodes, which do not visually represent an emoji, but usually get translated to the image or Unicode character.
A few lists on them:
–jeroen
Posted in ASCII, Development, Encoding, LifeHacker, Power User, Software Development, Unicode | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 