MPcN: Who let him in here? Yeah, I thought Jason was busy this winter skiing and abusing snowboarders. Betcha he wears a
flourescent romper.
PMcN: Anyway, after a lot of sweating on my part and I got unreadablest in a readable state. But you realize that you didn't have to mess with it at all in order to read my "secret message"? The gobbledygook above is compilable Java source code. All you have to do is cut and paste it into a text editor, save it as "Unreadablest.java", compile it, and run. Worked fine for me both under Windows and Unix. Don't have easy access to a Mac.
(See, I even gave you the file name so you *wouldn't* have to decode the Unicode escapes to find out what I named the class. The ".java" was a hint that it was Java source.)
(As an aside, I've found that cutting works best in UBB if you open the post as if you're going to respond to it and cut the code from the editing window, instead of just cutting from the HTML page.)
So I sent you off on a wild goose chase without even knowing it, he he, lucky for me you're so persistent! Yep. Just wouldn't let this one get the best of me.
Guess the automatic converter page I used wasn't the right one, alas. Yeah, next time find a *Unicode* converter page instead of an HTML entity converter page.
I got unreadablest to print out in java - in little chunks only. Java choked at the \u0022 character. What were you trying to do? Read the above source as regular text or just compile and run it? If you want to read it as regular text, I guess you'd have to replace all the Unicode escapes with their character equivalent. (Which is just the reverse of what I did to get it into that state.) As far as compiling it and running it, I mentioned above the simplest way of doing that.
Now regarding the \u0022 character -- those are quotes. Java doesn't like anything inside quotes to be split across lines. I could have provide the source as one long unbroken line, but I decide to break it up into multiple lines so it wouldn't distort the HTML page too much. The trick was putting the line breaks in places where it wouldn't disrupt quoted strings. That's one of the reasons I used both a System.out.print and System.out.println. Having even just that short message in one System.out.println caused the line to be way long.
Now I ask you: could you print out the whole of unreadablest.java as a String in java? Oh, wait. I think I see. You were trying to take my code as a text file and write a Java program to print it out, right? Or did you paste my code into a Java program and try to System.out.println it? I never tried either of those. That's how I guess you'd run into problems with quotes. The quotes in my original would then become embedded in your quotes and would have to be escaped. So you'd have to replace my \u022 with \" (or whatever the Unicode is for that).
Sounds like you had a nice wild goose chase of your own!
My encounters with text encoding usually leave me with a few bald patches on my head. I usually find myself clutching my eyeballs.