Re: [Nmh-workers] base64 ... just looking for advice

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Wolfgang,

> I think mhfixmsg is a powerful and useful tool, but I can't use it as
> I cannot edit the resulting files as my favorite editor gets confused
> over the mix of character sets in a single file.

A file containing an email in wire format, like nmh's, can have bytes
that represent glyphs/runes in a variety of character encodings.  That's
both before and after mhfixmsg have looked at it.  vim can't handle that
AFAIK.  (Can Emacs?  :-)  There isn't a solution since text/html can't
change character encoding because it may have headers that are then
wrong, and even if they're altered, which seems like a very bad idea to
me, then there's no saying that other aspects of the page don't expect a
particular encoding.

The solution is to split the single file into multiple ones, then vim
sees a single encoding used for the whole file.  Various ways to do that
have been mooted here in the past, e.g. an email being a directory
structure mirroring the MIME structure.

Hope that clarifies where the problem lies.

Cheers, Ralph.