Re: Charset Issue

[Jorge Luis <lists@xxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 04:18:16PM -0500, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> Here's the thing, though: how does your terminal handle malformed 
> characters? Many terminals fall back to displaying the malformed 
> pieces of characters as if they were ISO-8859-1 characters. When mutt 
> doesn't have to decode quoted-printable, it doesn't verify every 
> character letter-by-letter, and instead just does a wholesale 
> conversion from the character set the mail is labeled as (iso-8859-1,  
> in this case) to $charset (so, no change is made in this case) and 
> dumps the result to the terminal. Your terminal sees the 0xE1 byte, 
> recognizes that it is a malformed character, and does it's fallback: 
> pretends that the byte is an ISO-8859-1 character. What you're seeing 
> is not "correct"; you're seeing your terminal's error-recovery mode. 
> :)

Thanks, Kyle.  I never would have realized this on my own.  I really
appreciate the time you take to explain some of the finer points of
mutt usage on this forum.

     JL

-- 
Jorge Luis <lists@xxxxxxxx>