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### 3.17 Decoding Articles

Sometime users post articles (or series of articles) that have been encoded in some way or other. Gnus can decode them for you.

All these functions use the process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix) for finding out what articles to work on, with the extension that a “single article” means “a single series”. Gnus can find out by itself what articles belong to a series, decode all the articles and unpack/view/save the resulting file(s).

Gnus guesses what articles are in the series according to the following simplish rule: The subjects must be (nearly) identical, except for the last two numbers of the line. (Spaces are largely ignored, however.)

For example: If you choose a subject called ‘`cat.gif (2/3)`’, Gnus will find all the articles that match the regexp ‘`^cat.gif ([0-9]+/[0-9]+).*$`’.

Subjects that are non-standard, like ‘`cat.gif (2/3) Part 6 of a series`’, will not be properly recognized by any of the automatic viewing commands, and you have to mark the articles manually with `#`.