This doesn’t really have much to do with Ruby. It just seemed to be a
question that the Ruby community would be uniquely qualified to answer.
Yesterday I thought I knew what “text” meant. I though it was human
readable ASCII that followed any of three conventions for end-of-line.
So I felt perfectly comfortable telling someone to distribute a file as
"Windows/DOS text" to a group of people. I was confused when she asked
me “Well, which do you want, Windows or DOS?” So I looked at the
choices her program the OSX version of MS Word was giving her and, sure
enough, it was making a distinction between “Windows Text” and “DOS -
OS/2 Text.” As far as I can tell, in this locale there isn’t any
difference, but the program does know what locale it is running in. Am
I just being taken in by MS’s idiosyncratic menu design or is the
distinction real in some places?
TIA
···
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
-George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)
“Chris Gehlker” canyonrat@mac.com wrote in message
news:CDED74F4-3078-11D7-B7C6-000A27DA50C4@mac.com…
This doesn’t really have much to do with Ruby. It just seemed to be a
question that the Ruby community would be uniquely qualified to answer.
Yesterday I thought I knew what “text” meant. I though it was human
readable ASCII that followed any of three conventions for end-of-line.
So I felt perfectly comfortable telling someone to distribute a file as
“Windows/DOS text” to a group of people. I was confused when she asked
me “Well, which do you want, Windows or DOS?” So I looked at the
I haven’t really experimented with DOS files under Windows, but my guess is:
DOS and Windows should be fairly identical as long as you are storing ASCII.
However, if you use other characters such as a number of national characters
in western europe, Windows uses the ANSI characterset while DOS uses
whatever DOS codepage is active on the machine - which is different for each
european country whereas most western european languages are covered by the
same 8 bit ISO-Latin-1 characterset in Windows.
Linebreaks are CR + LF in both case.
Thus you should choose Windows over DOS for distribution.
Mind you, Windows also uses multiple codepages - Greek is not covered by
ISO-Latin-1 for instance, thus the problem has just moved.
The best choice in general is UTF-8 since it is ASCII compatible and covers
most of the worlds languages. The downside of UTF-8 is that many European
Windows applications may expect files in ANSI and may not understand
non-ASCII characters correctly. Notepad can always be used to open UTF-8 and
store it in a different format.
Mikkel
Thanks, Mikkel. That was a very good explanation.
···
On Saturday, January 25, 2003, at 09:11 AM, MikkelFJ wrote:
DOS uses
whatever DOS codepage is active on the machine - which is different
for each
european country whereas most western european languages are covered
by the
same 8 bit ISO-Latin-1 characterset in Windows.
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think
about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the
solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
-R. Buckminster Fuller, engineer, designer, and architect (1895-1983)