Does anybody know the true origin of the Hornby Class 37 No. D6843

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I'm sorry but I can't help you with your enquiry.

Please don't use a sig separator (dash dash space return) at the beginning of your message as many newsreaders interpret the whole message as a sig and strip it in a reply (as here).

It should only be used just before your sig (see below).

It didn't on my reader (Turnpike) which is usually quite compliant with standards (unlike, for example, Outlook). I'm no expert, but the sig separator looks to me more like a pair of em-dashes, whereas the things you get from the key above the p on a standard UK keyboard looks more like an en-dash (shorter). Alternatively, the sig line is locked in fixed-pitch mode, which produces longer dashes.

Here's an attempt to produce a sig separator using the keyboard:

In article , David Littlewood writes

It didn't!

David

It worked with Xnews! The rest of the post was stripped.

No, it is a valid sig separator. But where a message contains multiple separators, Turnpike (and, for that matter, Agent, which is what I use) considers the final one to be definitive. That's probably the most sensible way of resolving that particular ambiguity (since it allows for anyone accidentally including one in their text - possibly when copying and pasting, for example), but it's not universal. Thunderbird, for example, acts on the first separator it comes to.

Mark

So does Xnews.

OK Mark, that makes sense, thanks.

David

slrn seems to only recognise one sufficiently close to the end of the message.

Eric

Although it isn't stipulated anywhere in the RFCs themselves, I think that Turnpike, Agent and slrn are closer to the spirit of them than Thunderbird and Xnews. RFC 1849 says that if a signature is appended to an article, it "should" be preceded by the standard separator (dash-dash-space-CR), and that signatures "should" be short. It nowhere says that the sequence of characters used as a separator should not appear anywhere else in an article.

The implication, therefore, is that the character sequence should only be treated as a separator if a) it is followed solely by a block of text short enough to be considered a signature, and b) it is the only, or last, such sequence of characters in an article.

That implication is explicitly asserted in the draft Usenet Best Practice usefor-01 text, which says that:

"The signature is considered to extend from the last occurrence of that delimiter up to the end of the article".

Mark