Gobbledigook characters

[Tomtom1970]

Hello for the first time, everybody. I hope someone can help with this.

I've been sent an email from a regular correspondent in China which has appeared in my inbox as gobbledigook. An example of a few characters... 笉浣忋 €傛. It's the kind of thing I've sometimes seen on websites, but I've never had it come up in email before. I suspect the subject matter is sensitive, and that it's a deliberate decision of the writer to use a different font set. Can anybody suggest a way I might convert these otherwise meaningless characters into their equivalents in normal Chinese? Is it in fact a simple X=Y equation that creates this gobbledigook, or is it more complicated than just finding how to reconvert Y to X to get back to the original?

I'm fluent in Mandarin, by the way, so no need to soft-pedal on the linguistics, but I'm not that hot at computer-speak and would appreciate technical handholding if poss.

Thanks for any help.

[Hofmann]

The sender changing the font in the email would not change what we see here.

It's most likely a character encoding thing. Most people use UTF-8 while the sender used something else, but I can't figure out which encoding it is.

[Tomtom1970]

Thanks for that - 'font' and 'encoding' weren't necessarily mutually exclusive ideas to me! Any idea if it's possible for me to work back and get to something useful from this unreadable text, or is this a one-way process if it's coming out as unreadable at my end?

[roddy]

First thing to do is try and change the encoding in your browser - how you actually do this depends on the browser, but it'll be under some menu or other. Try UTF-8, GB2312, Big5, anything else listed under Chinese / East Asian.

[jbradfor]

IIRC, there are also web sites that try to "guess" at the encoding. If roddy's suggestion doesn't work, you can try to google for those, or post here and I'll see if I can dig up my notes....

One more possibility, and I think this is unlikely today but it is possible, that if your email went through a server that doesn't support 8-bit encoding (and only 7-bit), it might have stripped out the upper bit. If this is the case there isn't much you can do about it, except maybe have the sender resend in a format that is 7-bit friendly.

[Tomtom1970]

Thanks very much to all - I'll try those suggestions and see how I go.

[Tomtom1970]

None of the encodings in safari work - I'll get the sender to resend, avoiding the search terms I suspect they were trying to hide...

Thanks for the help - very useful for future reference in any case.

[roddy]

It's nothing to do with avoiding certain terms. If Chinese people want to avoid certain terms they abbreviate or romanize or otherwise mess around with, but they don't (and indeed can't) switch encoding in the middle of an email. Try this.

[jbradfor]

roddy means this one in particular. [that site has the annoying habit of using frames in a way that if you click on a tool it doesn't update the URL.]

[Tomtom1970]

The text is

杩欎釜閭鍦板潃澶暱锛屾湅鍙嬮兘璁颁笉浣忋€傛垜涓嶇粡甯哥湅鈥

Erik's mandarintools fixer page isn't coming back with a result, so I've forwarded him the email to see what he might make of it. The other page guessed at ASCII - I'm using safari, which doesn't have this as an option under Text Encoding - is there any way of tweaking safari to encode with ASCII, or am I simply asking the wrong question? Hey, I'm a linguist, not a computer person, after all - I've nothing but admiration for anyone to whom these things make sense.

I know the Chinese are past masters at avoiding problematic search terms, only this is a regular correspondent with whose emails I've never had a problem until I hinted at a politically difficult topic. I assume it's just coincidence, with hindsight.

L