Re: Displaying an arbitrary file in _both_ HEX and ASCII (Quoting error)
On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 04:49:38PM +0100, Linux-Fan wrote:
> > My favorite hex editor is `dhex` (Debian package `dhex`).
> > > From to the list of requirements, it does 4 of 6.
>
> Excuse me, this is mis-quoted, it should of course have been this
> (i.e. both lines attributed to me):
>
> > My favorite hex editor is `dhex` (Debian package `dhex`).
> > From to the list of requirements, it does 4 of 6.
A line that begins with the word "From" followed by a space often
triggers unwanted changes, as software attempts to work around the
legacy mbox formats.
In the mbox family of mailbox storage formats, all of the messages
in a mailbox are concatenated together into a single file, and the
way a new message is identified is by the string "From " at the start
of a line. Therefore, if a line of the message body begins with "From ",
something has to be done to "escape" it.
Usually, what happens is something sticks a ">" character in front
of it, and you get ">From ". In your case, there's an extra space,
which I haven't personally seen before, but... meh, it's close enough.
Maybe your particular set of mail software decided to use "> " as
the work around, or maybe your mail software added ">" and then
some sort of post-processing prettifying step added the space to
what it perceived as a quotation.
The world may never know.
It's not worth stressing about.
Just acknowledge/accept that lines beginning with From get mangled
sometimes.
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