Shoutbox

I did a short search for a similar topic but I couldn't find it, hence this one

For quite some time I've been keeping track of my chatlogs just for fun.

(It's funny to see afterwards in which periods you have spoken A LOT with some people, and where the contact was lost...where I was very busy or too lasy to talk with people, and the times where I had too much time on my hands and had  huge logs).

But since the new !plus for WLM I noticed 2 changes...

1. Instead of saving the files of this month in the "chatlogs folder" and being placed in the corresponding month folder at the end of the month, the logs are now placed in that folder from the start (no problems here... )

2. The logs are for some strange reason TWICE as big as they should be?
Now this is slightly annoying, and I think quite unnesessary. I was wondering why this happened and if there was a way to prevent it.

When I open one of my new logs (I use the .txt files) I see it uses 180 kB. Yet when I copy the text and paste it in a new file, save that one, I suddenly see the size decreased to only 90 kB. This happened to me with every single new log. Why is everything exactly twice as big?

Bug? Or does it have a reason, and if so, can anybody tell me how to prevent it of using unnesessary space?

I think, but am probably wrong, this is down to the way the log is encrypted.

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Originally posted by vaccination
I think, but am probably wrong, this is down to the way the log is encrypted.

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Uhm, well I never had the logs encrypted (didn't back then and I don't now).

Unless you mean that !plus now saves the text automaticly in a slightly encrypted way. But that doesn't seem logical in combination with the option to put a lock on things.

I think the files are saved in unicode and when you open them with notepad and save them again, it saves them as ANSI that's what makes the files smaller.

BTW: I'm not sure about this, but this makes sense

I also can't test it because i'm using the xml logs.

Indeed, it seems that Unicode exactly takes up 2x as much space as ANSI. So you were right about that part...

But that would mean that in the past !plus saved files in ANSI, and now it saves them in Unicode?

Once again, why and is there a way to prevent this?

quote:

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Originally posted by davidov
Indeed, it seems that Unicode exactly takes up 2x as much space as ANSI. So you were right about that part...

But that would mean that in the past !plus saved files in ANSI, and now it saves them in Unicode?

Once again, why and is there a way to prevent this?

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With Plus!3 you can choose if your logs are saved as ansi or as unicode.

Plus! > Preferences > Local Settings > Save text files with [ANSI/MBCS | Unicode] character set.


Some people use languages with exta characters which aren't in the main ascii set. Such characters belong to the unicode character set. Old OSs (eg: Windows 95) do not support unicode so it made sense to let the user choose between the formats.

Since Messenger Plus! Live can only run on Windows XP or higher, which does fully support unicode, it makes perfect sense that chat logs are now saved in unicode only to prevent the loss of special characters if you're talking to a person in Arabic for example (or even if a person uses some unicode characters in their name).

The main ascii set contains of 256 characters, in other words 1 byte can define a character. In standard unicode there are 65536 possible characters, which means to uniquely define a character you need 2 bytes (hence twice the amount of ascii).


EDIT:

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Originally posted by Ezra
Maybe patchou can reenable this option in a later build.

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For people who do not know the differences and possible implications, this can cause problems (eg: certain characters not logging). Even if you do know the differences and implications, people could always use some unicode characters in their names, texts, etc. Those will be lost if you save logs as ANSI.

Why is because there are a lot of people using unicode to write special characters.

I believe there was an option in msgplus! 3 where you could choose if you wanted to save with or without unicode.

As that option is gone from the preferences window I believe patchou removed this option. So there is no way to disable unicode.

Maybe patchou can reenable this option in a later build.

EDIT: Cookie kinda stepped on my point there

Ah yes that makes perfect sense.
Although I understand that it would be quite logical to remove the ANSI option in !plus live, since live only runs on XP... I think it would be a nice service to people to still give them the option to choose.

Another reason is because after a year it can save quite some MB's...

Ah well I hope Patchou hears my cry, and if not... there is no other option for me then converting all the new files manually :')

Last question: If I change the an unicode-log to ANSI while the month isnt over yet, what would happen? Will plus create a new log? continue in the ansi log? or just stop logging for that month...

Hmmm perhaps I can try this myself.

-edit-

Damn...
It creates a new log --> email@here.com(2)
Hmmm *crosses fingers* I hope patchou will bring the ANSI/Unicode option back again.

But is it really that bad? I generally archive my logs from previous years, that will make the files a lot smaller and still have the advantage of the unicode.

quote:

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Originally posted by Ezra
But is it really that bad? I generally archive my logs from previous years, that will make the files a lot smaller and still have the advantage of the unicode.

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Hmm? Explain...

What do you mean by "archive" and making them smaller that way?

It's not a big deal and all...only thing is that it makes compairing the logs from several years not possible. lol although I think 99,99% of the people out there don't give a damn lol.