Subj : Re: WX
To   : KenDB3
From : Digital Man
Date : Tue Mar 29 2016 05:37 pm

  Re: Re: WX
  By: KenDB3 to Digital Man on Tue Mar 29 2016 11:12 am

 >  > Right, but how does the rest of the BBS look with PuTTY set that way?
 >  > Probably not very good. Right now, Synchronet doesn't support any way of
 >  > detecting or tracking the user's character set or encoding and pretty
 >  > much assumes CP437. You can send UTF-8 from your script, but most clients
 >  > aren't going to display it correctly and there's really no way for you to
 >  > know which clients will or will not display it correctly.
 >
 >  >                                             digital man
 >
 > So, I haven't forgotten about this, I've just been rather tied up. I see
 > what your aiming at, and I think I'm at a bit of a disadvantage not knowing
 > some history. It sounds like you are trying to politely tell me that
 > UTF-8/Unicode is really not used in the BBS community, even outside the US.

I think in China it's used, but those BBSes (e.g. ptt.cc) are not really
ANSI-BBS.

 > But, how do other countries utilize special characters?

Depends on the country/locale. For many western countries, CP437 supplies
enough specialized characters. For others, they just require that the client is
preconfigured for the proper character set (e.g. CP855 in soviet block
countries).

 > Or, would it be a
 > case where those characters are ignored and replaced with the Non-Accented
 > characters that are more CP437 friendly?

I don't follow.

 > I think my problem is that data is coming back from Weather Underground in
 > UTF-8, which is not a problem when it is in (US) English, but starts to
 > present a problem with the couple of Latin based languages I tried to
 > implement. Is there any way to clean/convert the text before displaying it?

Yes, UTF-8 could be translated, but the results may not be very good/useful,
depending on stuff (e.g. the source and target locale).

 > Someone asked for this feature, and I thought it would be an easier ask than
 > some of the other requests I got, but it proved more challenging thanks to
 > the UTF-8 characters.
 >
 > Any advice is welcome :-)

Stick to US-English? :-) Seriously though, I don't really have any advice on
this topic as I haven't been big on translating software to other locales or
worrying about non-CP437-capable terminals. Maybe Deuce has some advice.
<shrug>

                                            digital man

Synchronet "Real Fact" #7:
Synchronet was originally intended as a replacement for WWIV BBS software.
Norco, CA WX: 56.7øF, 53.0% humidity, 5 mph ENE wind, 0.00 inches rain/24hrs

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