Re: [Nmh-workers] repl and mime handling

[Oliver Kiddle]

Ken Hornstein wrote:
> - If we have to choose one, the only logical choice is Unicode (which in
>   practice means UTF-8; maybe UTF-16, but a trip through the format
>   code made me think that UTF-8 is probably the only real choice).

One very reasonable option would be to use the current locale default.
This is what the current mh-format decode() does. The current locale is
also what you can expect the terminal to display correctly and the
user's text editor to handle.

The limitations occur where e-mails use characters that can't be
displayed in the current locale but we can't do anything about that.

We also have fixed files like replcomps and components. It wouldn't be
unreasonable to always treat these as UTF-8. \u and \U escapes are an
alternative but I'd prefer to be able to specify an alternative for
characters that won't work in the current locale.

Oliver