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 ‘Mojibake’ Category

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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:

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

Get it at a discount while it is hot: Delphi Thread Safety Patterns eBook by Dalija Prasnikar and Neven Prasnikar Jr.

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/06/01

Get the new [Wayback/Archive] Delphi Thread Safety Patterns eBook at a discount while it is hot:

Use Coupon Code: DTSPATT10 at checkout to get a $10 discount.
This promotional offer is valid through June 14.

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Posted in Delphi, Development, Encoding, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Mojibake, Multi-Threading / Concurrency, Software Development, UTF-8, Windows-1252 | Leave a Comment »

Last year, a classic Mojibake was introduced when Waterschap Amstel, Gooi en Vecht redesigned their IT systems

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/16

Last year, Waterschap Amstel, Gooi en Vecht sent me a paper letter notifying the yearly water bill was going to be late as they were redesigning their IT systems.

Their letter introduced a classic Mojibake that had not been present in all their older paper letter communication.

  • Street name on a letter via the old IT systems is "Pyreneeën":

    Pyreneeën goed geprint.

  • Street name on a letter via the new IT systems is "Pyreneeën":

    Pyreneeën geprint met Mojibake vervormingen.

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

The things I didn’t notice during cancer survival: ftfy 6.0 and more versions got released during my recovery (including the poem “Ode to a Shipping Label”)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/10

When writing this, [Wayback/Archive.is] ftfy · PyPI:history indicates ftfy was already at 6.0.3.

It is still my goto tool for figuring out the cause of Mojibake. I remember writing about it the first time in 2016 (see the ftfy category) when it was already at version 3.0, discovering it after a few Mojibake posts.

By now it even understands right-to-left Mojibake garbage: [Archive.is] Elia Robyn Speer on Twitter: “ftfy 5.8 is out! … A user reported that Hebrew text wasn’t being fixed, and this made me think about how to expand some of the trickier cases to non-Latin alphabets.”

Mojibake mishaps still happen a lot, so by now I hope I will have done a Mojibake themed Delphi talk at one or more conferences.

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Posted in !!con (bangbangcon), About, Autistic Spectrum/Autism, Cancer, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Encoding, Event, ftfy, Mojibake, Personal, Python, Rectum cancer, Scripting, Software Development, Unicode | 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 »

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