What's up with all those equals signs anyway?
a day ago
- #technology
- #encoding
- People are sharing old email excerpts on Twitter, questioning the presence of equals signs.
- The equals signs are not a code or OCR artifact but a result of poor email format conversion.
- Emails from the 80s used encoding like 'quoted printable' to handle long lines and special characters.
- Equals signs at line ends indicate a line continuation, meant to be removed during proper decoding.
- Incompetent processing led to equals signs remaining, sometimes incorrectly interpreted as character encodings.
- Special characters like non-breakable spaces were encoded with equals signs (e.g., =C2=A0).
- The issue stems from technical encoding standards and poor handling by those converting the emails.