"Raab, Andreas" wrote:
> 
> I strongly agree with the general direction of adding some 'harmless'
> binary header.

Considering what's harmless:
I'd exlude the Null character and the Ctrl-Z character (codes 0 and 26)
from the stamp. Some text editors truncate their input at the first Null
(because they cannot handle them anyway if they are coded in C), others
at the first Ctrl-Z (for historical reasons: CP/M files were terminated
with a Ctrl-Z, and that convention sort of took over for DOS and in some
aspects even Windows).
DEL (code 128) might be a problem for other operating environments (some
printers used to do strange things if they received a DEL). The same
goes for 255.

We could go back to the original definition of ASCII and use the STX
(Start-of-Text, code 2) character.

Regards,
Joachim
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