Re: [Nmh-workers] mhshow: unable to convert character set of...

[Andy Bradford]

Thus said Ken Hornstein on Fri, 06 Feb 2015 09:03:17 -0500:

> The real problem, from my perspective, is  3) ... what we should do is
> what  every  other  email  program  on  the  planet  does  and  simply
> substitute a  character instead of just  fail. So, we're not  where we
> want to be, but we're getting better.

Right, this is  the behavior I would expect. If  it cannot convert, then
just dump the characters (or perhaps  substitute, which is a fair effect
to be  making given that it  is probably safer  to do than just  the raw
bytes).  When I  browse to  a website  that has  characters my  encoding
doesn't understand it  puts a box-like character in place  of the actual
character. It's an annoyance, but better than no data at all.

> Now, the thing that David and I don't understand is ... what, exactly,
> is the problem with setting an UTF-8 locale?

Because everything else I use works  with my current locale, which means
I  have to  either change  the locale  for everything  else, or  make an
exception for nmh, which previously didn't  care what my locale was, and
it would  just make a best  effort. Personally, I didn't  mind the weird
characters (I primarily  use EXMH so the occasional viewing  of an email
that didn't  quite render  correctly was not  a problem)---I  can easily
ignore characters that don't turn into words.

> But the previous nmh behavior was  so wrong we really didn't have much
> of a choice here.

I understand that. At any rate, I'm  probably alone in this, so it's not
worth debating at this point. I will  find a way to make it work (either
using an environment variable for  invocations of show/next, or removing
iconv support from nmh).

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Andy
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