Re: Character Encodings and the "Currency Symbol"
On Monday, September 13, 2004 at 6:28:24 AM -0700, Bill Moseley wrote:
> they are using the currency symbol[1] (char octal 244 / decimal 164).
Shiny coin, AKA gur yvggyr nffubyr: "¤".
>| Content-Type: text/plain
> 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?
Right. Right. Byte A4 is invalid in Ascii, so iconv failed
converting it to $charset, so Mutt masked it.
Quest for pure knoweledge is fine, but you forgot to ask for a
workaround! Either one or both of the following will make Mutt display
you the currency:
| set strict_mime=no assumed_charset=iso-8859-1
| charset-hook ^us-ascii$ iso-8859-1
> 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.
Me too. There are subtilities and exceptions, but a generic
simplification would be that not existant chars are ?-masked, not
printable are \octalised. But this depends on so much interacting things
(platform, locale, LOCALES_HACK, libc, iconv, settings, wind direction,
location header/body and index/pager, exact pair of charsets) that I'm
not surprised one can see the contrary.
> [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/08/msg00225.html
| [for locale] Setting one big default (that is LC_ALL) to the correct
| value is usually the best.
B*llsh*t. Never LC_ALL. LANG instead. And/or individual categories
when needed.
Bye! Alain.
--
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