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A comment on Ftfy – fix Unicode that's broken in various ways. Parent comment

Re:Ftfy – fix Unicode that's broken in various ways by rspeer on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @08:14AM (#16105883)
In fact, ftfy already figures that text out! Here are the recovery steps that the website outputs:

    import ftfy.bad_codecs  # enables sloppy- codecs
    s = '!¡!HONDA POW'
    s = s.encode('sloppy-windows-1252')
    s = s.decode('utf-8')
    s = s.encode('sloppy-windows-1252')
    s = s.decode('utf-8')
    s = s.encode('latin-1')
    s = s.decode('utf-8')
    print(s)
And the decoded text is (for some reason):

    !¡!HONDA POW
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Re:Ftfy – fix Unicode that's broken in various ways by 534b44a on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @12:00PM (#16107596)
Thank you, I'd also tested that but it seems to simply remove the mangled string part. Maybe it's impossible to recover it automatically after all :/
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Re:Ftfy – fix Unicode that's broken in various ways by rspeer on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @12:58PM (#16108163)
No, no. That is the recovered text.

Originally, the text had one non-ASCII character, an upside-down exclamation point. A series of unfortunate (but typical) things happened to that character, turning it into 9 characters of nonsense, the 9th of which is also an upside-down exclamation point.

It looks like ftfy is just removing the first 8 characters, but it's reversing a sequence of very specific things that happened to the text (which just happens to be equivalent to removing the first 8 characters).

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