h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm playing the Notpron Internet game, and one of the riddles apparently requires me to look at the source code in ASCII.

I know how to view the HTML source code, but how do I convert it to ASCII?

Traveller in Time trying to decode characters
"That is as good as you can get.

ASCII stands for 'American Standard Code for Information Interchange' it is the character set generated by hour computer to make things readable. Computers work wit bits, grouped together as bytes, as it happens the first 127 values of the possible 255 for a byte are defined as characters, ASCII characters. An alternative for viewing a file would be Hexadecimal, the values of the bytes written in base 16, this is much more complex.

Although ASCII represents characters this does not mean the code behind it is meant to be readable language, however even in binary files some parts of the code, the string constants will form human readable words. This is also the case with HTML, most of it is for the machine but parts to be presented to the user will be in human language. "

You could try doing it by hand, just use the chart at http://www.asciitable.com/
I'm assuming you have a series of numbers, in which case you just look for the number in the decimal column, and find the corresponding letter in the chart.

There's probably web sites that do the conversion for you, all you would have to do is type or paste in the numbers. But you'll have to search for that, I'm not going to take all the fun out of the game.

And it just occurs to me that I may have misunderstood. Are they giving you a file, and you need to view the contents of the file as ascii instead of what normally happens when you double-click it? In that case, change the last three letters of the name (after the period) to "txt". If you don't see the period and last three letters, change your folder view options to show filename extensions, then change the last three letters.

Then double-click.

Right...

I clicked on 'View,' the clicked on 'Source'. I got a page of text with lots of HTML tags in it ( and and stuff like that). I think I'm supposed to view this source code in ASCII instead of HTML to get some numbers, but I don't know how to view it in ASCII instead of HTML.

I checked the game forum, and the hints were all of the type 'Are you looking at the *right* source code?

Traveller in Time coding
"Parts between <!-- and --> are supposed to be comment, they are ignored from display. Hiding text in HTML happens by commenting it out of sight that way. "

I'd guess then that you're *not* looking at the right source code. HTML *is* ASCII (or unicode, but then ASCII is a subset of unicode) so there's no trick there. Is there an image on the page? Try saving the image, then use the trick of changing the ".gif" or ".jpg" to ".txt" before opening it. Or if there is a flash animation, you can try decompiling that to get the source - I don't know how to do that however.

look at the html source code, at the bottom line.... commented, as expected. that's hot the source code is relevant.

Just got through that bit, yes the source code is relevant. And misleading. The obvious hint in the source code is not the part you want to look at.