Re: utf-8 problems continued
On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 03:14:43PM +0000, Michael Kjorling wrote:
> On 19 Mar 2008 15:02 +0000, by cl@xxxxxxxx (Chris G):
> > Does something, somewhere *guess* the character set from the stream of
> > characters it sees?
>
> Mutt looks at the message and picks the first charset from
> $send_charset that allows an exact encoding.
>
> http://www.mutt.org/doc/devel/manual.html#send-charset
>
On reading the manual I'm not sure I'm any the wiser, it says "Mutt
will use the first character set into which the text can be converted
exactly.", what does this mean?
What does mutt expect the text that is fed into it to be? If I feed
it text in utf-8 the surely it just stays that way - though thinking
about it this *doesn't* seem to be what's happening.
If I understand then mutt is trying to choose the 'least complex'
charset that it can. So even if my system is locally all set up to
work in utf-8 and my editor sends mutt a file with pound signs encoded
in utf-8 if the only special characters are the pound signs then mutt
will re-encode the file as iso-8859-1 and send it with that charset.
That would explain why my utf-8 encoded pounds were sent correctly and
understood by everyone, mutt recognised the pounds, saw no other
special characters and sent it all as iso-8859-1. So far so good (if
my understanding is correct). On the other hand my iso-8859-1 pound
signs *weren't* understood by mutt so it sent them as utf-8 'bad'
characters.
It would seem that all (ha, ha) that I need to do then is to get my
editor to play ball properly and be quite sure that mutt understands
what I have entered using the editor.
--
Chris Green