-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday, March 19 at 03:42 PM, quoth Chris G: >> 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?
For example, let's take the Euro symbol. If your email includes the euro symbol, mutt needs to decide which charset to use. If your send_charset is "us-ascii:iso-8859-1:utf-8", what happens? First, mutt uses iconv to try and convert your email into us-ascii. Since your email includes a euro-symbol, this will fail because us-ascii doesn't include a euro symbol, forcing mutt to try the next charset: iso-8859-1. This conversion attempt will ALSO fail, because iso-8859-1 doesn't include a euro symbol either. Finally, mutt will try utf-8, which will succeed. Now let's consider something like a u-umlaut. Again, it does not exist in us-ascii, so converting a message containing a u-umlaut into us-ascii will fail. The iso-8859-1 character set, however, DOES have a u-umlaut, so the conversion will succeed, and mutt will use that character set to send the email. You can re-create these conversion attempts by creating a text file (i.e. an email message). Make sure the file is in utf-8 format (just for demonstration purposes). To do the same checks that mutt does, run these commands in your shell: iconv -f utf-8 -t us-ascii file.txt >/dev/null && echo success! Did it print out success? If file.txt contained a Euro it didn't. Now try this: iconv -f utf-8 -t iso-8859-1 file.txt >/dev/null && echo success! Did that work? Again, if file.txt contained a Euro, it shouldn't have. Now this (which is a trivial thing): iconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8 file.txt >/dev/null && echo success! That's how mutt uses $send_charset to figure out the minimum charset to use for encoding an email. > What does mutt expect the text that is fed into it to be? Mutt expects the text your editor generates to be in $attach_charset, or if that isn't set, $charset. > 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. Correct. Another way of saying "least complex" would be "most compatible with other email programs". > 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. More or less, yes. > 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. Exactly! ~Kyle - -- We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it. -- Edward R. Murrow -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: Thank you for using encryption! iEYEARECAAYFAkfhP0QACgkQBkIOoMqOI17ifACcCdxnL4NDulEt64dbczUjFlGO pFkAoMck/Zr67cCDYboh+J+lu0Wnftrb =LejX -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----