Re: Display UTF-8 / non-ASCII characters in trn (2-line patch)

[N.M. M. <nm...@ca...>]

On Nov 4 2015, John Magolske wrote:
>
> ... when trn checks for control characters in an article it assumes 
> everything might be 7-bit with parity, so it strips off the top bit 
> before checking! ...
>
>and I'm now getting my utf-8 text unadulterated ... Of course I'll be
>in trouble if I ever encounter any post that is actually 7-bit-with
>parity, but I wonder if this can ever happen these days? In the olden
>time of UUCP, I suppose that was standard, but I think everything is
>8-bit these days.

No, it was never standard.  It was fairly common, at one stage, but
parity character sets were already disappearing by the time that ASCII
started to become a standard.  Even by the time UUCP was invented, they
were rare (even for networking, and very rare as native character sets),
but it is possible that they were used on at least some of the networks
the designers of UUCP used.  God alone knows why that hack was put into
rn, as I don't know of any current systems that used parity characters
by the time rn was developed, but I suppose that there might have been
some.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.