POCSAG: Show accented characters

[Nikotine1]

Description of the feature you're suggesting.

Hi,
I live in a region where I see a lot of French pocsag messages.
They use tons of accented characters and they all get replaced by a dot.

That's because of this piece of code in pocsag.cpp:

if (ascii_char < 32 || ascii_char > 126)
    state.output += ".";
else
    state.output += ascii_char;

Is it really needed? Could we for example allow ascii characters up to 165? If possible, I'll fork the code and test it.

Anything else?

No response

[Nikotine1]

I forked the code, removed the replacement of ascii characters > 126 by a dot, compiled and tested it.
It didn't work.
Words I know should have an é or à still show these letters as a dot, so that makes me think that perhaps they are encoded like that by the sender?

[htotoo]

Pocsag uses 7 bit ascii, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-paging_code_No._1#Message_format
So nothing above 126 should be valid. Also <32 chars are control chars, so those doesn't make sense too.

Get more info about the receiver they uses, and maybe we can figure out, how they encode the message.

[Nikotine1]

I've been reading some more and perhaps they use some sort of translation table, like they do here for Hebrew.
I guess I need to look at the raw bits to see which character they actually sent.

Edit: promising lead: EliasOenal/multimon-ng#69