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

2015-02-06 06:49:48
Andy wrote:

The previous version of nmh on my system didn't bother with
conversion (at least not to my knowledge) and would naively just
output the text/plain portion and let my terminal figure out what to
do with it (which occasionally left some characters unreadable, but
it was sufficient for my needs).

That's the key:  that was bad behavior.  Some characters could
have had worse effects than just being unreadable.

It seems now that nmh is trying to be more selective about what it
shows rather than just being liberal about it and showing me what is
in the file.

As noted above, that's a good thing.  If you want to see the raw
file, there are ways to do that without using mhshow, of course.

Either that or previously nmh was more successful at converting the
UTF-8 to US-ASCII.

No, it didn't convert before, by default.

Maybe it has something to do with this particular section I found in
the man page:

       If mhshow was built with iconv(3), then all text/plain parts
       of the message(s) will be displayed using the character set
       of the current locale.

I do indeed apparently have iconv support built-in

which is perhaps why it ignored the mhshow-charset-utf-8 directive?

Yes.

Shouldn't mhshow honor that setting regardless of whether or not
iconv is supported?

The goal was to remove the need for that kind of manual configuration.
If someone wants to show using a character set that doesn't match
their locale, that's beyond what nmh supports.

It does look like my only option is to set the locale for mhshow, or
to remove iconv support.

Or just set LC_ALL (or LANG) in your environment?  LANG gets set
for me by default on Linux, so I don't have to manually.  In fact,
I had to remove an old LC_CTYPE setting from my .bashrc.

And, it gets set to a UTF-8 locale for me.  The only time I see
conversion failures is with broken emails that have an incorrect
charset label.  Though I don't receive much (any?) text that can't
be converted to UTF-8.

David

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