$assumed_charset settings (was: special chars)
On Monday, March 19, 2007 at 10:10:40 +0900, Tamotsu Takahashi wrote:
> you can set "assumed_charset=iso-8859-1:utf-8"
Setting UTF-8 after ISO-8859-1 is useless. Any string is always
valid Latin-1. UTF-8 will never be tried nor selected.
The reversed order, $assumed_charset="utf-8:iso-8859-1" works
very well for headers. And could nearly be the optimal setting for
westerners.
However the same variable is used for bodies, but then only the
first item counts. And westerners generally receive non-MIME mails more
in Latin-1 (actually yet more in CP-1252) than in UTF-8. So westerners
want Latin-1 as sole $assumed_charset. Unfortunately this disables the
UTF-8 check, that would be so handy. Cookie or money, not both. ;-(
Next step enhancement above $assumed_charset could either be:
-a) Make 2 separate variables: One list of charsets for headers, and
one single charset for bodies.
-b) One var, but where multiple charsets work also for bodies.
Of course (b) is better for users, but I fear the pager code will
not cooperate easely...
> "assumed_charset=$charset:utf-8"
That works, and is an interesting variant around the historical
pass-thru behaviour. Less flexible but much more robust. However this
makes a terminal-dependant behaviour, while the non-MIME mails problem
naturally prefers a mails-dependant solution.
> messages with no charset parameter [...] were assumed to be in
> $charset. you can set assumed_charset=$charset to get the old
> behavior.
They were sent directly to display, not converted and invalid chars
not ?-masked, with only local control chars \octalised or ?-masked. That
may sometimes ressemble, but is not the same as assuming $charset.
Bye! Alain.
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