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Re: character encoding confusion


From: John Bokma
Subject: Re: character encoding confusion
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:17:51 -0000
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.1.50 (gnu/linux)

patrol <patrol_boat@hotmail.com> writes:

> I created a program in C that requires the degree symbol. The mode
> line indicates that Emacs is using the Latin-1 character encoding.
> According to Latin-1 encoding tables, the degree symbol is encoded as
> decimal 176, so that's what I used in my code. But when the character
> printed, it wasn't the degree symbol; it was a "shaded box" looking
> thing. Then I looked at an ASCII table here (http://
> www.asciitable.com/), and it says that 176 is indeed the shaded box
> that was printed in my program, and the degree character was decimal
> 248. So I used 248 in my code, and I got the degree symbol I wanted.
>
> But all this leaves me with the question that if Emacs was supposedly
> encoding the file in Latin-1, why doesn't the code for the degree
> symbol match up with the Latin-1 table? Why does it instead match up
> with some non-standard "extended" ASCII that I just happened to come
> across.
>
> Can anyone shed light on this?

Like Pascal wrote ASCII is 7 bit (0..127 decimal) and there are various
extensions ("code pages"). It sounds to me you're running your program
in a DOS box? If so the current code page, most likely 437 [1], of the DOS
box shows a shaded box for 176.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codepage_437

-- 
John Bokma                                                               j3b

Hacking & Hiking in Mexico -  http://johnbokma.com/
http://castleamber.com/ - Perl & Python Development


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