Tag Archives: mojibake

Starbucks making 5% ASCII art by mistake, via NWPlayer123.

Russian postmen fix an error caused by an ASCII-illiterate e-mail client in France. New aesthetic, anyone?

This letter was sent to a Russian student by her French friend, who manually wrote the address that she received by e-mail. Her e-mail client, unfortunately, was not set up correctly to display Cyrillic characters, so they were substituted with diacritic symbols from the Western charset (ISO-8859-1) The original message was in KOI8-R.

The address was deciphered by the postal employees and delivered successfully. Some of the correct characters (red) were written above the wrong ones (black).

Encoding problems are usually called Mojibake (from Japanese) but other languages refer to it as monkey’s code, letter salad, chaotic code and even little bushes. Read more at Wikipedia.

Makes you wonder how common this ‘mojibake literacy’ is among postmen…