7- vs. 8-bits

[Toru Tomabechi]

Robert J. Zydenbos wrote:

                The system I use (VSNL) is totally 7-bit,
> i.e. words containing characters above ASCII 128 become
> distorted (e.g. "Qu=E9bec" is the name of a Canadian
> province).

One point should be made clear. The `distortion' like "Qu=E9bec" is
made on sender's side. And this is not a distortion at all. This is
the "quoted-printable" encoding used to transfer the characters mapped
above 128 decimal code (more precisely above 160 decimal code, because
ISO standard does not allow the code points between 128-159) using
only 7bit ASCII characters. It is up to your mail-reader program to
decode and to remap the code to an appropriate character set. If your
mail-reader is MIME compliant and the mail that you receive contains
an appropriate "Content-Type" header, you must see the accented
letters correctly.

Toru Tomabechi
University of Lausanne