Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!lll-tis!exp.bessy.dbp.de!kerkhoff
From: kerkhoff@exp.bessy.dbp.de (Hans-Georg Kerkhoff BESSY-Berlin phone +49 82004-153, 30)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso.x400.gateway
Subject: forbidden characters in body of message
Message-ID: <897:kerkhoff@exp.bessy.dbp.de>
Date: 8 Sep 88 01:24:26 GMT
Sender: root@tis.llnl.gov
Distribution: inet
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 26
Approved: post-x400-gateway@tis.llnl.gov

Excuse me if this is a silly question.

When a message from BITnet is received by DFN-EAN-V2 (German X.400
approach) a (|) in the body of a message is replaced by an (!).
Allthough this is no big problem when transmitting C programs
because the (!) can easily be replaced by checking the compilation 
errors, it leads to unsolvable problems when VAX-VMS-DCL routines
are transmitted because the (!) indicates a comment and therefor
is widely used.

Is it an unknown rule not to use an (|) character in the body of a 
message text, or is this a common BITnet feature not to use the (|) 
character because this character can not be displayed by EBCDIC?

Or is this a problem of some gateway  ?

Until now I believed that the body of a message is untouched or at
least if it is converted to another representation it will convert
back to its original representation.

...Hans
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