Coming to a government near you..

On Wednesday 30 January 2013 11:14 The Natural Philosopher wrote in uk.d-i- y:

Compared to the UK with minus 1.2 trillion pounds?

Its unwise to post followups below the IOPs sig

Paul DS.

I th8ink you will find there is a difference between what's in the bank count and what's owed..

No one will lend Zimbabwe anything.

Colin Bignell

They are not government ones. They are personal ones.

nothing!

(if you post under someone else's signature line, most news software will trim off your post completely when replying)

nothing!

(if you post under someone else's signature line, most news software will trim off your post completely when replying)

That's quite amusing. I wonder how they figure out what a signature line is? As someone who writes software for a living I'm always amused to see new ways for software authors have helpfully shot themselves in the foot. As far as I am aware (and "News" is not my field so I'm ready to be additionally educated) a News item is simply text, with no implied interpretation of any part of the item.

Paul DS.

A standards compliant newsreader looks for a line in the body of the post which contains only "-- (line feed)" (ASCII codes &#x2D,&#x2D,&#x20,&#0A, if I've read the table correctly. ). It then assumes that any lines after this are a signature. It will then, according to user preference or possibly as hard coded, either strip these lines from the reply when composing, or ignore it.

... poor and starving if the skills you are showing here are anything to go by.

Always amused to see some ignorant braggart making a fool of himself.

Then you are ignorant.

The sig separator is "-- " as below.

A standards compliant newsreader looks for a line in the body of the post which contains only "-- (line feed)" (ASCII codes &#x2D,&#x2D,&#x20,&#0A, if I've read the table correctly. ). It then assumes that any lines after this are a signature. It will then, according to user preference or possibly as hard coded, either strip these lines from the reply when composing, or ignore it.

John, can you indicate the RFC? I've not managed to find an RFC which interprets the body in any way.

Thanks, Paul DS.

And you've never come across Usenet?

I'm afraid it's you that's unipedal in this case.

And there goes the other foot ...

Paul, can you start using a proper newsreader that indents quoted text properly? Cheers.

I haven't checked in the RFCs. It's just the way I understand that this is done both by custom and usage.

There's an article in Wikipedia:-

I found this:-

And:

There is a long-standing convention in Usenet news which also commonly appears in Internet mail of using "-- " as the separator line between the body and the signature of a message. When generating a Format=Flowed message containing a Usenet-style separator before the signature, the separator line is sent as-is. This is a special case; an (optionally quoted or quoted and stuffed) line consisting of DASH DASH SP is neither fixed nor flowed.

On Wednesday 30 January 2013 15:47 Paul D Smith wrote in uk.d-i-y:

I'm afraid you are mistaken Paul.

The dash-dash-space-newline ("-- \n") is a long accepted sig separator in USENET posts and to a significant extent, emails.

And most correctly programmed clients will treat it specially.

That precludes, sadly, Google Groups, which makes a complete hash of any interaction with USENET.

How can you have less than nothing? Brian