02 Mar 16 16:09, you wrote to me:

 ml>> thanks! do you have a screenshot of that same message in its
 ml>> ungarbled form?? i have an idea of what's going on but i need to see
 ml>> it ungarbled to be sure or not...

 jl> Ok. I wasn't able to get an "ungarbled" version of that specific
 jl> message. So here's a picture of a different message, garbled and
 jl> ungarbled, side by side.

ok... there is defnintely a byte offset problem... one says it is message 1
of 5 and the other 1 of 6... what i'm suspecting is a problem of dealing
with ANSI in the message... either that or a counting problem where one
array is zero based and the other counting from 1... that would indicate
that maybe there is a difference between the size of an (eg) integer which
leads to the difference between the way an integer is defined... again,
that's only an example and why i asked about 16, 32 and 64 bit stuffings
earlier...

the reason i mention a possible problem with ansi is because of the ansi
fluff'n'stuff in all three images... there's ansi stuff on the end of each
line on the left side as well as some sort of ansi mess on the right... the
differences between the two message rendering in the latest image plainly
show the that there's problem in rendering the message...

individual line breakdown:
1. looking at the first line, there's a problem with the date on the left
and the number of messages on the right...
2. the second line has dropped the first character of the sender... that's
at least a one byte difference at that point...
3. the third line has dropped the entire "To  : " preamble and
that indicates that there's six bytes that have been missed...
4. the fourth line is missing the "BBS'" on the left side and the
following NOTE portion is missing the 6 bytes making up the "[cia]
" portion that is not even show on the right...
5. then there's the STAT line which doesn't even depict the same byte
values and on the right the "local" attribute is depicted with a
EOF character...

i'm not so sure that ansi is involved now that i look closer but there is
definitely a byte count problem somewhere... you need to look deeper at
what bytes are being seen by both flavors of the tosser because something
is not reading the bytes properly for display or is not writing them
properly to the message base... or maybe both... that 4th line showing
"[cia]" on the left and "impulse sysop" on the right
confuses me right now... one or both should contain more or at least parts
of the other... the real question is what the original packed message in
the PKT looks like and were does that "[cia]" portion come from
with... with or without the trailing space...

)\/(ark

Always Mount a Scratch Monkey

... "Joyeux Noel et Bonne Annee." - French Christmas
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