Character Encodings and the "Currency Symbol"

[Bill Moseley <moseley@xxxxxxxx>]

Ok, this is a rather basic question:

I received mail with US dollar amounts, but in place of a dollar sign
("$") they are using the currency symbol[1] (char octal 244 / decimal
164).

The mail they are sending does not have a charset setting, only:

  Content-Type: text/plain

Now, mutt is displaying the "?" symbol for this character.

Since there's no "charset" mutt assuming the message is US-ASCII
only (right?).  And since there's a char value above 127 it's displaying the
question mark, right?


I'm confused about when mutt displays the question mark and when it
displays the escaped characters (e.g. \244).  I found a message[2]
that comments about the difference, but it seems opposite to what I'm
seeing.  That is, a character code that is not defended in the mail's
charset (ascii in this case).

So when does mutt display the "?" and why does it display the escaped
value?


My locale settings are en_US.  One odd thing is if I pipe the mail
through to od -a, then od(1) displays a "$" symbol instead of the generic
currency symbol.  less(1) or cat(1) on the other hand, displays the
currency symbol character (kind of a 4-point star pattern).  I wonder
why od(1) is substituting the "$" symbol for the currency symbol.


[1] http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/latin1/3.html#A4
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/08/msg00225.html




-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley@xxxxxxxx