Any computer user, no matter how advanced he is in technology, sometimes faces the need to receive an email. And what is the recipient’s surprise when he receives a text of the form “WIDTH:? *:?% PANEMGNE SHCHLVZ (* RN: P (?: A ZShShShShShy9-8? P *? PN”) or the like.
If you thought that this is an encrypted message from representatives of MI6 or the FSB, then you are mistaken, and the assumption that this letter is from extraterrestrial civilizations will also be wrong. In fact, everything is much simpler and more boring. The encoding of the text in the letter you received does not match the encoding of your mail application or browser.
When the mail client is not able to transcode such text, it displays "crooks". And this means that you need to use a specialized decoder, that is, a program that can figure out and fix the situation caused by a failure in determining the encoding of the text.
Of the programs written by Russian developers, the well-known Stirlitz product is the best at dealing with such problems.
In this material, I would like to briefly talk about the wonderful features of this software product created by Vsevolod Lukyanin.
"Stirlitz" may be needed in those cases where determining the encoding of the text in the application or letter is a difficult task, and it is necessary to read the text at all costs. He easily decrypts texts in Russian that were encoded in encodings: KOI-8r, ISO-8859-5, DOS, MAC, and others. Stirlitz will also deal with HTML or Quoted Printable, Unicode, xxencode, base64, binhex, uuencode formats. If a block consists of several fragments, each of which has its own text encoding, then this situation will not confuse the program. It will correctly decode each fragment and collect from them a transcoded, readable block.
But the possibilities of “Stirlitz” do not end there, except for decoding, he also knows how to translate text from one encoding to another, win, koi, mac, dos, lat, iso and others are available.
Working with the program is convenient and comfortable. If you need to quickly encode a piece where the text encoding has flown, just copy it to the clipboard and transfer it to the Shtirlitsa window, this block will be automatically transcoded to Win-1251 encoding. If necessary, you can configure the application so that it will monitor the buffer and transcode the text that is stored in it into the correct format.
I will say a few words about installing the program. After downloading it from the network and unpacking it to the hard drive, we see the following set of files.
Shtirlitz.exe - the program itself.
Shtirlitz.hlp - help files and user guide.
Shtirlitz.cnt - continuation of the Help-file.
Shtirlitz.lat - transcoding schemes
Shtirlitz.ncd - encoding file
Shtirlitz.vcb - program dictionaries
uninstall.txt - a guide for your actions in case of uninstall
We double-click the Shtirlitz.exe file, it will launch version 3.0 of the program, the latest at the moment. In the future, to facilitate the work, you can create a shortcut for “Shtirlitsa” on the desktop.
In the final part of this article, you will find out what else there are ways to use this application.
The main one is to copy using CTRL + C, (either by selecting it with the mouse and then right-clicking on the selected one and selecting the “copy” menu item) to the clipboard the text that needs to be recognized and pasting it into the program window. If automatic recognition does not work and the text encoding is still not recognized, click the Decode button.
The backup method is that you can ask the program the types of files that it will try to decode. In order to make the necessary settings, go to the "Explorer" program and right-click on the file that we need. In the context menu that appears, select “open with Stirlitz” and in the next window click Decode.