From: MikkelFJ <mikkelfj-anti-spam@...>
Date: 2003-01-26T01:11:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Windows Text vs DOS Text


"Chris Gehlker" <canyonrat@mac.com> wrote in message
news:CDED74F4-3078-11D7-B7C6-000A27DA50C4@mac.com...
> This doesn't really have much to do with Ruby. It just seemed to be a
> question that the Ruby community would be uniquely qualified to answer.
>
> Yesterday I thought I knew what "text" meant. I though it was human
> readable ASCII that followed any of three conventions for end-of-line.
> So I felt perfectly comfortable telling someone to distribute a file as
> "Windows/DOS text" to a group of people. I was confused when she asked
> me "Well, which do you want, Windows or DOS?" So I looked at the

I haven't really experimented with DOS files under Windows, but my guess is:
DOS and Windows should be fairly identical as long as you are storing ASCII.
However, if you use other characters such as a number of national characters
in western europe, Windows uses the ANSI characterset while DOS uses
whatever DOS codepage is active on the machine - which is different for each
european country whereas most western european languages are covered by the
same 8 bit ISO-Latin-1 characterset in Windows.

Linebreaks are CR + LF in both case.

Thus you should choose Windows over DOS for distribution.

Mind you, Windows also uses multiple codepages - Greek is not covered by
ISO-Latin-1 for instance, thus the problem has just moved.
The best choice in general is UTF-8 since it is ASCII compatible and covers
most of the worlds languages. The downside of UTF-8 is that many European
Windows applications may expect files in ANSI and may not understand
non-ASCII characters correctly. Notepad can always be used to open UTF-8 and
store it in a different format.

Mikkel