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NT 4.0 notepad and type strange bug - regular file refuses to display

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Alex Kotopoulis

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Jun 16, 1997, 3:00:00 AM6/16/97
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This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

--------------6D8E1A0D355B
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hi there,

I have a nice small text file attached which refuses to display in
notepad.exe or using type on a DOS shell. It only uses standard 7-bit
ASCII characters, CR-LFs as end-of-line, it is 1,615 bytes and its
longest line is 414 characters.
Still it has the following effect with different editors/viewers in
Windows NT:

notepad.exe:
Only block characters are displayed on one line
type:
Only ?s are displayed
edit.exe, wordpad.exe, Visual C++ 4.2 editor:
The file is correctly displayed.

If I edit this text, for example duplicate the first line, is is
suddenly visible from both viewers. I'm using Windows NT 4.0
Workstation, Service Pack 2 installed, the notepad.exe executable is
45,328 bytes long. I replicated this behavior after copying the file to
other filesystems, also on other NT machines.

Is this a bug or is there something strange with my text? Any
suggestions, confirmations, bugfixes?

Thanks, alex :-)

--
======================================================================
/ \ Alexander Kotopoulis
/ \ Software Engineer
/ \ Phone: (408) 369-6635
\ Black & White Software, Inc. Fax: (408) 369-7406
\ / mailto:al...@blackwhite.com
\ / WWW: http://www.blackwhite.com
1901 South Bascom Ave. Suite 700 Campbell, CA 95008
=======================================================================

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Jerold Schulman

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Jun 16, 1997, 3:00:00 AM6/16/97
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I get the same behavior. I opened it in a hex editor and there are unprintable
characters which might account for this.


Jerold Schulman - Microsoft BackOffice <MVP>

JSI, Inc.
1045 Essex Court, Alpharetta, GA 30201-3811
Orders:+1-800-585-9588 Phone:+1-770-475-3820 Fax:+1-770-442-3820
Web Site: http://www.jsiinc.com Internet Mail: j...@cis.compuserve.com

Alexander Frink

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Jun 17, 1997, 3:00:00 AM6/17/97
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In article <33A581...@blackwhite.com>,

Alex Kotopoulis <al...@blackwhite.com> writes:
> I have a nice small text file attached which refuses to display in
> notepad.exe or using type on a DOS shell.
>[...]
> notepad.exe:
> Only block characters are displayed on one line
> type:
> Only ?s are displayed
> edit.exe, wordpad.exe, Visual C++ 4.2 editor:
> The file is correctly displayed.

This is certainly a Unicode problem. Unicode aware programs like
type and notepad seem to use some heuristics to distinguish between
a standard 8bit ASCII and a 16bit Unicode text, which may fail
in some cases like yours.
I replaced the second and fourth character with a \0 byte (with
debug.exe), if I type the text now it starts with:
Cs????...

I don't know if there are generally accepted guidelines for
distinguishing ASCII from Unicode texts. At least Microsoft
should publish what they do to avoid these problems (I haven't
found anything at the MS web site).

Best regards,

Alex
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alexander Frink E-Mail: Alexander.Frink (at) Uni-Mainz.DE
Institut fuer Physik Phone: +49-6131-393391
Johannes-Gutenberg-Universitaet
D-55099 Mainz, Germany (sorry for inconvenience due to UCE prevention)

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