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Mail.app and Extra Character
Authored by: nburatovich on Sep 19, '02 02:12:09PM

I believe the problem described regarding Mail.app is a problem with the system, and not with Mail.app in particular. It seems that if text is copied from an NSTextField/NSTextView of any cocoa application, an extra character is prepended to the beginning of the copied data. I am not sure if this extra character represents part of the styledata of the text or is just a bug with the pasteboard system. But other cocoa apps using NSTextField/NSTextView don't seem to see the extra character, and not too many Carbon applications have problems (although Mozilla for example, seems to freeze and destroy my browser cache everytime I copy and paste a URL from a cocoa application).

As a test, open TextEdit type something and copy it. Then open an application such as BBEdit or an application made with an older version of REALbasic (apps made with the newer versions seem to be fine) and paste it. Boom, extra character visible in BBEdit, and it messes up the formatting of the editfield in older REALbasic apps.

I am not sure if Apple plans to resolve this issue or if it's a new change that other developers are going to have to watch out for. But it is quite annoying and never existed before 10.2 to my knowledge.



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Mail.app and Extra Character
Authored by: nagani on Sep 19, '02 09:27:38PM

I can't reproduce this on my system. The only hacks installed are from Unsanity: FruitMenu, Xounds, WindowShade X. No problem here copying from TextEdit or OmniWeb to BBedit 6.5.3 (PBG4 500MHz, 1GB ram)



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Mail.app and Extra Character
Authored by: Wevah on Sep 20, '02 12:03:18AM

The extra character is a Unicode byte-order mark. From the BBEdit 6.5.3 release notes:

In Mac OS X 10.2, Cocoa applications include a Unicode byte-order mark in the 'utxt' scrap flavor (which is arguably correct, but still different from previous versions of the OS and breaks third-party applications). BBEdit now handles this condition, so there will be no more junk character at the beginning of text pasted from such applications.

This explains the problems that pasting from Cocoa to Carbon creates, and also why it isn't reproducible in BBEdit 6.5.3.



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