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Chenc - Decoding Encoding

Description

The letters and digits you see on the screen are all stored internally in the server as numbers, 1s and 0s ultimately. For the geeky among you, the letter 'A' is stored as the number 65, but 'a' is stored as 97, in pretty much all modern standards, called 'encodings'. The standard English alphabet, digits and most common punctuation symbols are stored in a relatively small range, from 32 up to 127 (standardised as the ASCII encoding). Now, computers are much happier dealing in the range 0-255, which means that mud clients are free to use encodings that support a wider range of characters. UTF-8 is an encoding that is compatible with most other encodings for the standard English alphabet, digits and most common punctuation symbols, but supports a far wider range of characters. Unfortunately, these characters are supported in a way that is incompatible with non-UTF-8 encodings. This means that any text using interesting (non-ASCII) characters, including aliases, board posts, newspaper articles and finger information, will not display correctly in the MUD.

Chenc

The purpose of using this command is to tell the MUD what encoding (UTF8, Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1) your mud client is using, so that your text can be interpreted correctly. The command prompts the MUD to send you the same text in the 3 different formats, and also an example of what the text should look like. You are asked to select the lowest number where you can see the text as it is meant to display, and the MUD then uses this information to interpret everything your mud client sends from that point forward.

Syntax Forms

chenc 

Have the MUD try to set your proper encoding.

chenc <encoding> 

Set yourself as using a particular kind of character encoding.

Examples

Example one
> chenc
> 1) '“'
2) '"'
3) '"'
Which is the lowest number with a '"' next to it?