In article ,
Si $3o&m writes:
| In message , Sacha
| writes
|
| Looking back at the recipes I found, all those mean one half of Sauvignon
| Blanc and three quarters of a cup of sugar. In the ice cream recipe all of
| them mean one half. I wonder why they 'translate' that way onto a pasted
| recipe.
|
| cos usenet is a 7 bit medium and characters like 1/2 are characters that
| require 8 bits and so end up as unknown in the 7 bit environment.

Well, I remember the days when 1/2 was a 7-bit character :-)

But you are quite correct, of course. More precisely, you can rely
on the basic ASCII graphic characters, space and newline - and nothing
else. These are A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and `~!@#$%^&*()_+-={}|[]\:";'?,./


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.