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I received an email with the following:
<x-html>
<html>
<body>
<br>
.....
Coralea Lander# # #
....
what are these # ? actual character not accepted
how do I get rid of them?
or what is the sender doing to create these?
normally do not have trouble receiving html emails
Discussion is locked
It's missing the end tags and more so how is this broken? If an email comes in that's not correctly formatted why not display it as-is and not render the HTML?
Bob
the end tags are there, I just did not include them in my post.
The actual character I am concerned with has a byte value = 194.
The complete message is viewable, but has these "unprintable" characters embedded. Makes reading the message very difficult.
What could the sender be doing to embed these characters?
How that displays depends on the character set the message is written in. In the usual Windows-1252 is A circonflex (Â), but if the sender uses another character set he sees something different. The character set used should be mentioned in the e-mail header.
Of course, it's possible that the version of Eudora you use, doesn't fully understand this and displays a #. Or that the e-mail program used by the sender makes a mess of something. Why not ask him? He knows better than we.
Kees
original occurance was a forwarded message, making it difficult to query original sender.
Have since found a msg directly to me with this character - have sent the query to the sender.
Did find that Word has some fonts with this character.
thx for the help
the hash tag or tictactoe sign or pound sign or whatever you wish to call it, is used to insert a comment line, one that is not part of the program script being run.
James - you did not read everything, the hash tag was not the character in question
the character has a byte value = 194, the forum will not allow this character in a post
I run into that all the time doing copy/paste. I have to paste into a text editor sometimes and use some ASCII only character table to find and remove the improper characters, like tab and paragraph marks, multiplication signs, etc.
In my post above I made an A circonflex (Ã
. And I can even make a phone (&phone or the Malteser cross (&maltese. It's not so limited as you think.
Kees
Then try another browser. I'm using Firefox 33.1.1 in Windows 7, but it doesn't work in Internet Explorer 9. I can't try IE 10 and 11 here, and I can't try Chrome at all.
Kees
did you change it since I posted? What I saw before were small rectangles with 3-4 small characters in them. However when put in a reply box, that's when you get the rejection too.
http://glenburniemd.net/CNET/KeesSymbols.png
No, I didn't change it. Only Lee can.
And indeed, you can't puit them in the reply box as they show. You have to use the html-entities. This is the surprising list I picked them from: http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref
Kees
Instead of Linux when I saw those, so went back to the Windows computer and this is what still shows in it.
http://glenburniemd.net/CNET/KeesOddCharacters.jpg
My character coding is set to Unicode in FF28. I have it that way instead of Western because it is necessary for Verizon's text mail msgs when sent to appear correctly on my daughters' phones. I also use Unicode however on my Linux box too and for same FF28, so really odd.
OK, here is a summary of what I learned:
The problem is NOT Eudora reading HTML.
What is happening - an A circumflex (ascii value = 194) is being inserted when the original message contains a sequence of (at least 3) space
characters.
I have only observed this in email bodies <x-html> with character set = utf-8.
As suggested, I have contacted a few senders - none are doing anything they are aware of to insert this character.
One sender and I have experimented and determined the space character sequence being replaced.
I have looked at emails as plain text - the A circumflex is there, therefore Eudora in not doing the insertion.
One of the senders is Facebook.
In my original message, the example (yes I did not include the end tags - my bad) the sender was creating a 2 column table, using the space character to position the second column.
So, now my problem is how to (politely) tell the sender what to do so these A circumflexes are not inserted?
thx for the various suggestions.
How do I tell Facebook to send plain text?
another sender has this in their header:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; format="flowed"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
I set my Thunderbird to sent utf-8 (that's in the options) and sent myself a message with 6 spaces enclosed by the words spaces. This is how he source looks in the received message
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--------------030900000401030901000309
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Spaces spaces.
--------------030900000401030901000309
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#333333">
Spaces     spaces.<br>
</body>
</html>
So it's spaces in the text part, and a lot of A circumflex'es in the html-part. Apparently, that is how an html in utf8 looks when representing 6 spaces. And, in fact, Thunderbird shows it perfecly on the screen. So it's definitely an Eudora problem, with Eudora not interpreting the utf8 part correctly. Just use a better e-mail client and all will be fine. Or ask the sender to send a text mail or an html-mail using the Windows-1252 character set in stead of an html mail in utf-8, to circumvent your Eudora issue until that is fixed. Eudora is open source at the moment, based on Thunderbird, so better file a bug to the community that maintains it. Maybe it's even changed already in the latest version (you didn't tell what version you have).
For an explanation I looked at the hex representation of the text in the eml-file. That's C2 A0 C2 A0 C2 A0 C2 A0 C2 A0 20 and all was clear immediately. The first 5 spaces typed by the sender are translated to non-breaking spaces (A0 = 160 decimal) to show on the screen as spaces. As you surely know, a browser is required to compress consecutive spaces to 1 space on the screen, so if those consecutive spaces were not converted to non-breaking spaces they would be shown as 1 space, messing up the 'table' the sender typed.
Kees
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