Yea, I dunno. If it were me, and I suspected some such thing. I'd run it through some sort of filter; SED,AWK, or such. That'll strip (filter) out anything but "normal" alphanumeric (plain text) text. I'd have added Perl itself to that list. But given your current problems, that might not be as "foolproof". I've got one I whipped up years ago that'd work for you. But it'll only work on a *NIX box. You happen to have one of those handy?

On an aside. I used to embed the BEL character strategically in the comment file in all my .zip files. It was a blast. It'd play a little ditty every time you opened (extracted) the file. It scared the $#it out of Windows users -- others too, for that matter. Because you can't see them -- not that anyone would even expect them to be there. I can be so evil, sometimes <maniacal laugh>.

--Chris

#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
use Perl::Always or die;
my $perl_version = (5.12.5);
print $perl_version;