-={ samedi, avril 04 2015, 10:13:18 -0700 }=-

Hey mark!

 ml> i cannot... it turns out that the character seen here is ALT-15
 ml> or 0x0f in CP437...

0xa4 is 0xa4 no matter what.  According to iconv;

  echo -e "\xa4" | iconv -f latin1 -t cp437
  iconv: illegal input sequence at position 0

which means that there is no character in cp437 that matches 0xa4 in
iso-8859-1.  Same can be said for for the Euro sign which is what 0xa4 is in
iso-8859-15, alias latin9 or latin-9 if you prefer.  0xa4 in any 8-bit codepage
is always whatever the 0xa4 character is for that particular codepage and never
0x0f unless of course it *is* 0x0f which in this case it wasn't since it is
0xa4.

However, 'echo -e "\xa4" | iconv -f cp437 -t latin1' will be 0xf1 in iso-8859-1
which is "LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE" according to
http://www.utf8-chartable.de/ which is what I see in utf-8 except the code
shows as U+00F1 in the status bar in vim.  However that is still 0xa4 in cp437.

Life is good,
Maurice

... Don't cry for me I have vi.
--- GNU bash, version 4.3.33(1)-release (x86_64-atom-linux-gnu)