Known issues with copying code from Mathematica to other platforms?

Question

I just noticed that if you have this in MMA (8.0.1 / win7-64):

and y

Answer 1

Copying Mathematica code to the Usenet Mathematica group sometimes scatters all kinds of weird characters throughout your code (you never knew when it would happen to you). The workaround would be either:

1. Cell > Convert To > InputForm and then do a copy

2. Edit > Copy As > Plain Text or Input Text

The latter doesn't work in this case. It's still a mathematically incorrect conversion that you'll get. The former does seem to work.

Update
If you ever encounter strange characters in posts in the Mathematica newsgroup (e.g., as in here) the following function will decode it (in all the cases that I tested).

translateQuotedPrintable[str_String] := 
  StringReplace[str, {"=" ~~ c1:HexadecimalCharacter~~c2:HexadecimalCharacter :> 
    FromCharacterCode[FromDigits[c1 <> c2, 16], "Math1"],"=" ~~ EndOfLine -> ""}]

Just paste the whole posting between quotes in translateQuotedPrintable[" ... "] and the post will be cleaned up.

For the curious: the encoding that you may see in these usenet postings is called Quoted Printable. It is used to convert character encodings that differ from the standard 7-bit ASCII set to ASCII. Many common MMA symbols, like the Rule symbol, are encoded this way if not previously converted to ASCII by InputForm cs. To decode a code one needs to know the original character set because QP only yields the hexadecimal position in the character set. In MMA's case this will most commonly be Math1.