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Re: Displaying different character sets on console
From: |
Aidan Kehoe |
Subject: |
Re: Displaying different character sets on console |
Date: |
Thu, 27 Jan 2005 13:16:31 +0000 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.1002 (Gnus v5.10.2) XEmacs/21.4 (Rational FORTRAN, linux) |
Ar an séú lá is fiche de mí Eanair, scríobh Adam Sjøgren:
> I am curious as to why the headers specify a Japanese charset to
> tranfer Greek letters?
Because Mule was implemented in a way that’s very friendly to ISO 2022,
which specified a universal character encoding a couple of decades before
Unicode. So the natural Mule way to encode a non-ASCII character in a mail
is to write it using ISO 2022 and to specify iso-2022 as the MIME
charset. (The -jp is defaulted to because Mule was implemented in Japan; it
could equivalently be -kr or -cn.)
Of course, outside East Asia, very little software understands ISO 2022, and
for the sake of recipients’ clients’ it should have used iso-8859-7 or
UTF-8.
--
“Ah come on now Ted, a Volkswagen with a mind of its own, driving all over
the place and going mad, if that’s not scary I don’t know what is.”