Shoutbox

I was wondering if anyone knew why my chat logs now have everything spaced with black squares once I decrypt them?   I am assuming that the black squares represent unprintable characters (nuls or backspace, etc).

Besides those black squares, it appears that the rest of the contents are correct.  (If I read slowly I can make everything out....)

Example:  (see attachment since black squares whon't paste here)

Logs older than a couple of weeks (3/4+) are fine.   I am not sure at what point things went wrong...  (MSGPLUS update, MSN Msg 7 upgrade/update)  Since the older logs decrypt fine, I am assuming the issue is tied to the encrypting process.  (??)

I am using Messenger Plus! 3.54.132 and MSN Messenger 7.0.0813.

Thanks....

Where's the attachment?

As for the unprintable characters, are they every other character?

Opps... I swore I attached the JPG on the initial posting.  Oh well...

And Yes.  The unprintable character IS every second character.  (AS the attachement SHOULD show... if it gets attached this time!

Thanks for any help...

Macmanhere

Which program are you using to read them?

Those (new) logs are saved as unicode-textfiles because they contain (at some point) an unicode character. This can well be in your contact's nickname or everywhere else which is saved.

So this has nothing todo with the decryption or Messenger Plus! or even MSN Messenger at all. It is your own text editor/viewer which is causing this. The reason why you see those squares is because your text viewer that you use doesn't support unicode textfiles. That is also the reason why Plus! opens them in notepad as notepad is set as the default viewer of textfiles in Windows. Notepad does support unicode textfiles. So if you want to open log files with your own editor/viewer, make sure that it suppost unicode.

Unicode characters consist of 2 bytes of each character. Normal ANSI characters only has 1 byte for each character.

quote:

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
Notepad does support unicode textfiles.

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It does so by tagging a 'magic character' at the beginning of the file. My gues is Plus hasn't put this character at the start of the file.

quote:

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Originally posted by raceprouk

quote:

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
Notepad does support unicode textfiles.

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It does so by tagging a 'magic character' at the beginning of the file.

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The BOM (Byte Order Mark) is almost a mandatory 2, 3 or 4 byte indentifier for unicode files. Mind "almost" because it is nowhere specified that you should do it. Although, for compatibily reasons, it is very highly recommended.

The official BOM for UCS-2 Unicode in Little Endian Order or UTF-16LE (what we know as plain "unicode") is 0xFF 0xFE. (note that this has nothing todo with Notepad though; it isn't something Notepad/Windows/MS has invented, it is an official independant standard)

Also, Notepad can reconize unicode textfiles even if it doesn't include a BOM...

quote:

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Originally posted by raceprouk
My guess is Plus hasn't put this character at the start of the file.

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Messenger Plus! does add this BOM to unicode textfile logs

(also notice the "ÿþ" in the beginning of the file, viewed in a uncompatible textviewer as shown in the screenshot provided by MacManHere, these two characters are the 1 byte characters with ascii code 0xFF and 0xFE).

It is only that some developpers never heared or used unicode before and thus their applications aren't unicode compatible, lust like it is the case with the program MacManHere uses to view textfiles and thus such programs interpret every byte as a single character, which is wrong as 1 unicode character has 2 bytes.

(There seems to be kind of a "bug" when saving unicode log textfiles though, but this small "bug" doesn't have anything todo with what is talked about here, and certainly not with MacManHere's problem)

Thanks to all that have responded.

Yep... the unicode is the issue.  I do a lot of work with plain text files in an industrial programing environment and the editor that I have been using for years is not unicode friendly. (For those interested: Programmers File Editor 32 v1.01 [PFE32])

I verified that with NotePad, EditPad Lite or other similarly Unicode aware editors, my "extra black square characters" disappear.

Now, since I deal with a lot of TXT files related to my work and would prefer to continue to use my PFE32 - I need to see if I can modify the extension that Messenger Plus uses when decrypting the logs.  If I could change it to .log or something, then I could associate EditPad Lite to .log extensions and reset my PFE32 to handle my regular .txt files.

Thanks again everyone,

Brad "MacManHere"

quote:

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Originally posted by MacManHere
Now, since I deal with a lot of TXT files related to my work and would prefer to continue to use my PFE32 - I need to see if I can modify the extension that Messenger Plus uses when decrypting the logs.  If I could change it to .log or something, then I could associate EditPad Lite to .log extensions and reset my PFE32 to handle my regular .txt files.

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not possible I'm afraid, the extension is fixed at .TXT...


What _could_ be relativly easly possible and still maintains total compatibility is that Patchou adds a registry setting or something which let you choose which program will open the textlogs (which is now the associated program), this is also a request which more people could like I think. So, I'll ask him and sees what he says about it. But don't get your hopes too high up though. Adding such features takes a bit of time... I need to learn my lesson better, there is already such a registry setting... LOL... 


You need to place the key "LogViewerProgram" in "HKCU\Software\Patchou\MsgPlus2" in your registry and set its value to the path/file to your logviewer program like so:
"c:\blahblah\myviewer.exe "%s"" (mind the quotes and parameter)

quote:

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Found on the official help pages: registry tweaks
registry path: HKCU\Software\Patchou\MsgPlus2
value name: LogViewerProgram

Use this value if you want Messenger Plus! to open a different program than the default text editor when opening log files. The parameter location must be specified with a %s tag and it is recommended to enclose the tag with "".

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If you rather not "mess" in the registry, you can also do this with Choli's Plus! Tweaker Tool, also found on that page...

Thanks.  After I had posted my thoughts about an option to set the decrypting extension, I thought about checkiing the Misc Registry Settings.

I found the <LogViewerProgram> reference,  added it and it works beautifully!

<smiles>

Thanks again to everyone...


Brad <MacManHEre>