[sylpheed:32871] Re: problem with quoted-printable encoding and charset iso-8859-1

Celejar celejar at gmail.com
Sun Feb 22 08:44:35 JST 2009


On Fri, 20 Feb 2009 23:05:36 +0200
Cristian Secară <orice at secarica.ro> wrote:

> On Fri, 20 Feb 2009 14:10:41 -0500, Celejar wrote:
> 
> > I'm receiving mail with these MIME headers:
> > Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; format=flowed
> > Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable
> > [...]
> > The text contains '=20' at the end of every line, which is legitimate
> > ('space'), but it also contains scattered '=92', '=93' and '=94'.
> > Sylpheed (2.5.0 on Debian) shows the 'unprintable' box glyphs for
> > these, apparently because those numbers are undefined in 8859:
> 
> These characters (’, “ and ”) are coming from Windows CP1252 8 bit
> proprietary encoding and they cannot exist under ISO-8859-1.

Thanks for the explanation; I see that Wikipedia notes this problem:

"The encoding is a superset of ISO 8859-1, but differs from the IANA's
ISO-8859-1 by using displayable characters rather than control
characters in the 0x80 to 0x9F range. It is known to Windows by the
code page number 1252, and by the IANA-approved name "windows-1252".

Many web browsers and email clients treat the MIME charset ISO-8859-1
as Windows-1252 (the extra control codes in ISO-8859-1 are forbidden in
HTML anyway), and so codes from it are often seen in web pages that
declare their encoding as ISO-8859-1. However, there can be
difficulties from the use of such characters, particularly when the
recipient is using a non-Windows system, or systems that attempt to
fully implement the standards."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252

> > Am interpreting all this correctly?  Is the sending mailer just broken
> > and sending bad mail?
> 
> It appears yes, the program should warn about the impossible
> encoding in the given conditions and offer to switch the encoding as
> Unicode instead (or ask the user to correct its text, but it is
> unlikely that an average user knows exactly what the precise problem
> is).

I shall notify the sender.

Thank you,
Celejar
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