[aprssig] Please, standardize UTF-8 for APRS

[Stephen H. Smith]

Keith VE7GDH wrote:
> Matti OH2MQK wrote..
>
>> All existing systems will fail to correctly show characters that are
>> outside US-ASCII range.  Will they fail so badly as to break
>> themselves (software crash or something), is another issue.
>
> See my reply to Chris G4HYG. After replying to Chris via APRS message
> (ack not received) I realized I had received messages from two stations
> and not just from him. Some of my reply to him should have gone to you.
> See the UI-View screenshot at www.ui-view.org/~files/UTF-8_Messages.jpg
> I'll paste it in here too, but the screenshot is the one that counts.
>
> G4HYG-2   Hi Keith, Finnish characters follow: ÅåÖöÄä 73, Chris
> OH2KKU-2 this is ascii english
> OH2KKU-2 this is utf-8 english
> OH2KKU-2 this is utf-8 with scand chars pC$ivC$nC$ sC$C$nnC6t
> G4HYG-2  OK Keith, I just sent an email to the APRS SIG confirming it.

Interesting.....   Somehow the UTF-8 being generated by G4HYG and OH2KKU 
are not the same.  

Both the Finnish characters and the Scandinavian characters are being 
rendered as garbage in UI-View as one would expect.

However the mailing list post renders the Finnish characters correctly , 
while the "scand chars" are reproducing as "garbage" here (in a 
UTF-8-compliant emal client).  My guess is that somewhere, an email 
client was set wrong that mangled the header of the Scandinavian string 
so that it wasn't recognized correctly as UTF-8. 



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Stephen H. Smith    wa8lmf (at) aol.com
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