OT document format

I tend to move files back and forth from Mac to Windows to *nix.

My windows editor (NoteTab) is unable to recognize the Mac linefeeds and
tends to make long lines of everything with little square boxes where
the linefeeds were.

So what format is best for exchanging documents between different OS's?

DOS/Windows
Mac
UNIX
EBCDIC
Dos ASCII

???

And just what is the difference between ASCII and ANSI?

I'm unsure what the linefeed are, my catchalls seem to be:

/\r\n|\n|\r/
/\f/

I think the \r\n is windows, \n is UNIX and the \f is Mac

Is it better to use the numeric equivalents?

Jeff

On Mon, 02 Aug 2004 04:19:08 GMT, Jeff Thies
<jeff (AT) spamalanadingong (DOT) com> wrote:

I tend to move files back and forth from Mac to Windows to *nix.

My windows editor (NoteTab) is unable to recognize the Mac linefeeds and
tends to make long lines of everything with little square boxes where
the linefeeds were.

That might explain a site I'm trying to rework now. I noticed square
boxes too. (well, the w3c validator noticed them for me, I think). I
think it must've been from a Mac.

Don't know much about Macs so I can't help you there.

So what format is best for exchanging documents between different OS's?

DOS/Windows
Mac
UNIX
EBCDIC
Dos ASCII

???

And just what is the difference between ASCII and ANSI?

I'm unsure what the linefeed are, my catchalls seem to be:

/\r\n|\n|\r/
/\f/

I think the \r\n is windows, \n is UNIX and the \f is Mac

Is it better to use the numeric equivalents?

Jeff

Toby Inkster wrote:

Jeff Thies wrote:


So what format is best for exchanging documents between different OS's?

<snip>

I think you're getting three different concepts muddled up. Firstly
character set -- use UTF-8 or ISO-8859-15, not ASCII. ASCII hugely limits
which characters you'll be able to use. It has no £ nor € for instance.

It looks to me that in the windows text editors I've used that the
character set used is itself set by the OS, not by the text editing
program. Does that sound right? What a mess, at least on the windows side.

Secondly, use Windows line endings. Most Unix editors and many Mac editors
should be able to both read and write Windows line endings. Certainly
Nedit and Nano on Linux can.

That is what I've been experiencing. Windows (as is so often the case)
handles other OS's poorly. The Mac hasn't complained, and of course, the
linux web server has no problem with anything.

Thirdly, ignore ANSI -- it will only be important to you if you're doing
text-mode DOS programming in fancy colours.

That will come as a blow to a client of mine who proudly proclaimed that
she only used ANSI!

Thanks. All this is so basic and internalized as to be obscured in every
day use. The simplest problems cause me more grief than anything else!

Jeff