yEncoding and Rosetta

Umm…the thread looks damaged. I’m posting to see if this forces vBulletin to grab the OP for AHunter3.

??

Most odd. I knew something was amiss when I saw Anthracite’s name as most recent poster along with 0 as the number of replies…

What I had been asking was:

I’ve started to run across yEncoded downloads in places where previously they would be BinHex or UUEncoded, so I downloaded Rosetta, a yDecoder for the Macintosh.

Snagged a yEncoded file to try it out on, dropped it on Rosetta, and it DID decode, or thinks it did, but the results are gibberish. Tried another file, same result.

I’m wondering…could this be because yEncode-oblivious software such as a browser (which displays it onscreen as text) are garbling it somehow before and/or in the process of saving it as text to hard disk? Inserting or interpreting or removing characters that need to remain as they were?

Or…is the yEncode format perhaps not quite ready for prime time? I know it uses some 8-bit characters in the code, whereas BinHex and UUEncode limit themselves to the safer/more compatible 7-bit character set (the standard American ASCII set, I believe).

AHunter3, check out Why yEnc is bad for Usenet written by newsadmin Jeremy Nixon explaining how yEnc works and pointing out its trouble spots. I don’t necessarily agree with all of his points and I think his logic is faulty in re: to bandwith usage and savings but he makes good points that yEnc’s implementation is faulty and breaks some usenet standards.

However, it appears that Pandora’s Box has been opened and us usenet downloaders will have to deal with it. As for your specific problem, make sure that you have the most recent version of your decoder software as new versions of yEnc have been released frequently and aren’t always backwards compatible.

Well…since I tried to save your OP and failed, I’ll try to offer some other assistance.

From:

http://www.winews.net/yenc/user.htm

BTW, I would have answered sooner, but I’ve been trying to get the SDMB server to accept a single post for…oh, about an hour now…