Re: dashes and non-breaking spaces

[Benjamin Riefenstahl]

Hi Karl, all,


Karl Eichwalder writes:
> Broken by the mail program of my mail partner.  His mail program
> treats all mails as iso-8859-1 resp. windows-1252 encoded and while
> he answers the encoding mixture happens.
>
> [...]
>
> I think it isn't worth the trouble (to many false positives?).  If
> you want to try: If an iso-8859-1 labeled text contains escapes,
> most probably it is windows-1252 encoded; if there are still escapes
> and the text is quoted, try to treat it as UTF-8.

Those are not "escapes" strictly speaking.  If you decode UTF-8 as
cp1252 or latin-1 you just get sequences of unusual non-ASCII
characters.

If the problem occurs regularly with texts marked as iso-8859-1, you
can try UTF-8 first and than fall back to cp1252.

First try to decode the text as UTF-8.  Because UTF-8 follows some
very strict rules, it's possible to check for these rules, and than
the probability to mistake any non-UTF-8 text for UTF-8 is very low in
general (< 99%, I believe, even for short texts).  This is even more
so for latin-1 or cp1252 texts, because these encode languages where
sequences of non-ASCII characters are rare in the first place.

If the text is not UTF-8, just treat it as cp1252.  Encoding-wise all
texts that are latin-1 can be displayed as cp1252 without any
problems.


benny