What extended ASCII character set uses 0x9D?

[Ben Bacarisse]

John Nagle <nagle at animats.com> writes:

>     I'm cleaning up some data which has text description fields from
> multiple sources. Some are are in UTF-8. Some are in WINDOWS-1252.
> And some are in some other character set. So I have to examine and
> sanity check each field in a database dump, deciding which character
> set best represents what's there.
>
>    Here's a hard case:
>
>  g1 = bytearray(b'\\"Perfect Gift Idea\\"\x9d Each time')
>
>  g1.decode("utf8")
>    UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 21: invalid start byte
>
>   g1.decode("windows-1252")
> UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 21: character maps to <undefined>
>
> 0x9d is unmapped in "windows-1252", according to
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252
>
> So the Python codec isn't wrong here.
>
> Trying "latin-1"
>
>   g1.decode("latin-1")
>  '\\"Perfect Gift Idea\\"\x9d Each time'
>
> That just converts 0x9d in the input to 0x9d in Unicode.
> That's "Operating System Command" (the "Windows" key?)
> That's clearly wrong; some kind of quote was intended.
> Any ideas?

I wrote a little shell script to try every encoding known to iconv and
the two most likely intended characters seem to be cedilla (if someone
mistook it for a comma) and a zero width non-joiner.

The former mainly comes from IBM character sets and the latter from IBM
and MS character sets (WINDOWS-1256 for example).

Neither seems very plausible so I'm betting on an error!

-- 
Ben.