mozilla-lists.mbou...@spamgourmet.com wrote, on 11 Oct 16 17:14:
That also affects opening previously saved drafts. So, for example:
- Start composing a message with UTF-8 encoding (like Paul, that's my
default) and include a character not covered by the standard ASCII set
(in my case, usually "£") ...
Interesting. What you call "standard ASCII" is what we used to call
"high ASCII."
By "standard ASCII", I meant the first 128 characters. "£" is one of the
extended characters in some charsets. In UTF-8, it's encoded as a
two-byte sequence. Hence when an email containing "£" encoded in UTF-8
is decoded using an extended ASCII charset, it appears as two separate
characters.
The first 128 characters (up to ... xyz{|}~€ in Windows
Character Map) are the most basic, and the last 127 (beginning with
‚ƒ„…†‡ˆ‰Š‹ŒŽ) sometimes cause trouble. The high ASCII set also
includes the accented Western characters mentioned by the OP, such as
àáâãäåæçèéê..., but not Eastern European characters such as ăĺčďů.
The exact characters included in the high/extended ASCII range depend on
the particular character set being used. The one you use may include /
not include those characters, but another might. There's not one single
extended ASCII charset but several, each with an emphasis on particular
languages or regions, including the characters needed for those
languages in its extended range.
At any rate, if high ASCII is causing problems, that suggests that SM is
trying for some reason to make do with a seven-bit encoding instead of
eight bits.
It's not extended characters as such that causes a problem, but emails
being decoded using the wrong character set. The 128 standard ASCII
characters are encoded the same in all extended ASCII-based charsets and
also in UTF-8, so for those of us in Western countries, using the wrong
encoding generally isn't noticeable except for the odd character outside
the standard ASCII ranges.
That was educational (or memory-stirring, since I had read about all
that a long time ago) for me: It seems that the problem might lie in
the extended ASCII characters used for pt-BR text, which (since SM
doesn't have any place to specify that particular language) might mean
it tries to use an inappropriate one (if that's what you meant by
"There's not one single extended ASCII charset but several, each with an
emphasis on particular languages or regions, including the characters
needed for those languages in its extended range.")
It might also answer another query I raised recently in this thread:
"Western" characters -- but what's that: Is that an euphemism for
"English"? Portuguese, Spanish, French, all use "Western
characters", IMHO; but I suspect the former (ie, "Western")
actually means "English"...
I had thought that, in SM/Mail, there were basically 3 text encoding
options: English (called "Western"); Unicode; and 'other languages'.
For many years, I used 'Western' but, as it seemed more and more
messages used Unicode, switched to it (this was at the same time as the
'drafts gibberish' problem started to become more annoying), thinking
that Unicode (is that the same as UTF-8?), at least, should be
"universal"...
Discounting the cases where one opens a message with the wrong encoding
(which is easy to identify since, in such cases, re-opening the message
with the correct encoding makes the problem go away), it seems this
problem (which I described with the Drafts) only appears when a message
mixes extended ASCII characters with lots of standard ASCII ones (would
you say that's a correct way of putting it?).
--
Thanks beforehand for your attention, and I hope to hear from you soon.
s) Alexander Yudenitsch <ale...@postpro.net>
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