This is pure conjecture by someone who's never written a Perl script to send commands to a telnet server:  Could the "weird box characters" be Unicode byte order marks? What character encoding is the text (presumed to be) in? If, indeed, the unwanted characters are Unicode BOMs, then this might explain why they seem to disappear in your logs, which they should do in any modern text editor.

In reply to Re: Probably easy, but I'm stumped - telnet question by Jim
in thread Probably easy, but I'm stumped - telnet question by taigu

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