On Wednesday, April 5 at 09:28 PM, quoth Derek Martin:
The original post from Kyle is encoded in the brain-damaged cp1252, an encoding which (AFAIK) is Windows-centric, perhaps even Windows-specific, though iconv clearly knows about it on my system... Kyle's original message contains a non-ASCII single quote in the contraction "it's", which is displayed properly on my system.
Actually, I specifically added cp1252 to my send_charset list because I was under the impression it was somewhat more standard than utf-8 (if nothing else, I get a lot of webmail-originated email that pretends to be sending iso-8859-1 when it is in fact sending cp1252, but since cp1252 is a superset of iso-8859-1, I’ve taken to using a charset-hook to make mutt presume cp1252 formatting in the case of all iso-8859-1 messages).
If there is a more standard charset (?) that I should use for outgoing messages that includes curly-quotes (“”‘’), I will quickly change my own setup to be more “standard.”
Kurt's response is encoded in iso-8859-1, which either does not contain that particular character (which I think is true, though I'm definitely no expert and very unsure about that), or at least the conversion from cp1252 was not done correctly on Kurt's system. Most likely the character was not present in the target encoding (it's a non-printable control code in iso-8859-1), and Kurt's system just copied the character verbatim, producing a non-printable character in that encoding, which mutt displays with a '?' character.
Very interesting, especially since Kurt’s system is Mutt 1.5.11. You’d think it would be able to handle any iconv-supported encoding…
Not particularly worthy of note is that this particular apostrophe shouldn't be here at all... it's a grammatical mistake. The contraction "it's" is a contraction for "it is", whereas Kyle clearly meant "its", the possessive pronoun (or adjective, whatever linguists have decided to call it today). I mention it despite its lack of noteworthiness because I was an English teacher and prone to pedantry anyway, and I can't help myself... ;-) It's a common mistake, and it's a pet peeve of mine. One could easily claim such a mistake to be a type-o, but analysis of the author's other writing samples usually reveals otherwise (i.e. it is made with far too great a frequency to genuinely be a type-o)... But I digress.
Yes, yes, I know. More often, it’s a thinko rather than a typo: almost every other noun (particularly pronouns) in the English language uses an apostrophe to indicate possessiveness, only somewhere in history some pedantic nut decided that the rule should have an exception for some reason. I used to get pedantic about this particular gaffe as well, until I started using that particular segment of my brain to debate internally whether putting the punctuation inside the quotes when ending a sentence with a quoted term (American method) or outside the quotes (British method) made more sense to “me.” (See? That just looks odd to me). (That too.)
~Kyle
--
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
-- Henry Spencer
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