Allessandro,
Try a 'print it' of this:
[...]
And after this,try to read the 'ascii.txt' file with BlockNotes(Win95).
If you compare the content of BlockNotes to the content of a, you will find a big difference. WHY?
Because of the differences in the character sets used (Note: This is determined by the *look* of the bitmaps describing certain characters). Squeak uses a Mac Roman character set whereas Windows uses an Ascii character set. While the first 127 characters are the same, the mapping of everything starting from 128 is fairly different.
How can I avoid this difference and all the consequent problems?
You can use a character translation table. There is one in sqWin32Window.c mapping from Win to Squeak. It looks as follows
{ 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99,100,101,102,103,104,105,106,107,108,109,110,111, 112,113,114,115,116,117,118,119,120,121,122,123,124,125,126,127, 173,176,226,196,227,201,160,224,246,228,178,220,206,179,182,183, 184,212,213,210,211,165,208,209,247,170,185,221,207,186,189,217, 202,193,162,163,219,180,195,164,172,169,187,199,194,197,168,248, 161,177,198,215,171,181,166,225,252,218,188,200,222,223,240,192, 203,231,229,204,128,129,174,130,233,131,230,232,237,234,235,236, 245,132,241,238,239,205,133,249,175,244,242,243,134,250,251,167, 136,135,137,139,138,140,190,141,143,142,144,145,147,146,148,149, 253,150,152,151,153,155,154,214,191,157,156,158,159,254,255,216 };
and is used to translate the input characters in the VM. The reverse table (e.g., mapping from Squeak to Win) can be created by
| squeakToWinTable | squeakToWinTable _ ByteArray new: 256. 1 to: 256 do:[:i| squeakToWinTable at: (winToSqueakTable at: i)+1 put: i-1].
Hope this helps. Andreas