This charset is available in recode under the name
ASCII-BS, with BS as an acceptable alias.
The file is straight ASCII, seven bits only. According to the definition of ASCII: diacritics are applied by a sequence of three characters: the letter, one BS, the diacritic mark. We deviate slightly from this by exchanging the diacritic mark and the letter so, on a screen device, the diacritic will disappear and let the letter alone. At recognition time, both methods are acceptable.
The French quotes are coded by the sequences: < BS " or "
BS < for the opening quote and > BS " or "
BS > for the closing quote. This artificial convention was
inherited in straight ASCII-BS from habits around Bang-Bang
entry, and is not well known. But we decided to stick to it so that
ASCII-BS charset will not loose French quotes.
The ASCII-BS charset is independent of ASCII, and
different. The following examples demonstrate this, knowing at advance
that `!2' is the Bang-Bang way of representing an e
with an acute accent. Compare:
% echo \!2 | recode -v bang:us | od -bc
Bang-Bang -> ISO_8859-1:1987 -> RFC 1345 -> ANSI_X3.4-1968 (many to one)
Simplified to: Bang-Bang -> ISO_8859-1:1987 -> ANSI_X3.4-1968 (many to one)
0000000 351 012
351 \n
0000002
with:
% echo \!2 | recode -v bang:bs | od -bc
Bang-Bang -> ISO_8859-1:1987 -> ASCII-BS (many to many)
0000000 047 010 145 012
' \b e \n
0000004
In the first case, the e with an acute accent is merely
transmitted by the Latin-1:ASCII mapping, not having a special
recoding rule for it. In the Latin-1:ASCII-BS case, the acute
accent is applied over the e with a backspace: diacriticized
characters have special rules. For the ASCII-BS charset,
reversibility is still possible, but there might be difficult cases.
Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.