The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘CP850’ Category

A while ago I bumped into some GPI Mojibake examples, but soon found out I should use the ftfy test cases

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/11/22

I have been into more and more Mojibake example pages like [Wayback] Mojibake: Question Marks, Strange Characters and Other Issues | GPI

Have you ever found strange characters like these ���  when viewing content in applications or websites in other languages?

They made me realise that all these (including the Mojibake examples on my blog) are just artifacts, but the real list of examples is the set of ftfy test cases at [Wayback/Archive.is] python-ftfy/test_cases.json at master · LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy

I got reminded when Waternet moved from paper mail using “Pyreneeën” to email using “Pyreneeën“. Not as bad as Waterschap AGV did earlier: they took it one level further and made “Pyreneeën” out of it, see Last year, a classic Mojibake was introduced when Waterschap Amstel, Gooi en Vecht redesigned their IT systems.

This seems like a trend where newer systems perform worse than older systems. I wonder why that is.

BTW: the trick on the [Wayback/Archive] Python.org shell to run ftfy (which is not installed by default) is first dropping to the shell (see my post How do I drop a bash shell from within Python? – Stack Overflow), then starting python again:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in CP850, Development, Encoding, ftfy, ISO-8859, Mojibake, Python, Scripting, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8 | Leave a Comment »

In this day and age, web sites with delivery back-ends still have Unicode issues: at least @Woonveilig, @Medireva and @PostNL still have trouble

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/09

Nowadays, some 35 years after the first Unicode ideas got drafted and 30+ years after the Unicode Consortium saw the light, UTF-8 is served my more than 95% of the web as shown in yesterday’s post UTF-8 web adoption is huge, closing 100%, but only soured up since around 2006..

I mentioned this:

It means that nowadays there is a very small chance you will see mangled characters (what Japanese call mojibake) when you’re surfing the web.

Serving UTF8 does not mean no unicode problems.

Below are some issues that happened not too long ago and still happen. I have reported them to all parties involved through web-care, but no response whatsoever, and this is bad: Unicode support beyond basic ASCII for the below systems are still broken even for relatively simple non-ASCII characters based in diacritics decorating a standard ASCII character.

Yes, I know the realm of encoding and code pages is a mess, especially when handling data in multiple layers of an application stack. That’s why I wrote this post in the first place, and have a whole encoding category of blog posts plus a Mojibake subset.

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Posted in Communications Development, CP850, Dark Pattern, Development, Encoding, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Mojibake, Software Development, Unicode, User Experience (ux), UTF-16, UTF-8, Windows-1252 | Leave a Comment »

Which encoding failure did encode “vóór” into “v3/43/4r”? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/02/24

From quite some time ago, but still very relevant as encoding issues keep occurring:

A while ago, I saw the text “v3/43/4r” in a document.I know it comes from “vóór” (the acute accent emphasises in Dutch), and wonder which encoding failure was applied to get this wrong.

Source: [WayBack] Which encoding failure did encode “vóór” into “v3/43/4r”? – Stack Overflow

From the [WayBack] answer by rodrigo:

  • ó: is U+00F3, and occupies the same codepoint (0xF3) in a lot of different encodings (most ISO-8859-* and most western Windows-*).
  • In CP850 the codepint 0xF3 is ¾ (U+00BE), that is the three-quarters character. It is the same in other, less used, codepages (CP775, CP856, CP857, CP858).
  • The ¾ is sometimes transliterated to 3/4 when the character is not directly available.

And there you are! “vóór” -> “v¾¾r” -> “v3/43/4r”.

The first part (ó -> ¾) is the usual corruption of ANSI vs. OEM codepages in the Western Windows versions (in my country ANSI=Windows-1252, OEM=CP850). You can see it easily creating a file with NOTEPAD, writing vóór and dumping it in a command prompt with type.

–jeroen

Posted in CP850, Development, Encoding, Software Development, UTF-8, UTF8, Windows-1252 | Leave a Comment »