perl-unicode

Re: RFC 2231 (was Re: Encode::MIME::Header...)

2002-10-08 09:30:04
On Tuesday, Oct 8, 2002, at 17:52 Asia/Tokyo, Jungshik Shin wrote:
On Mon, 7 Oct 2002, Dan Kogai wrote:

As I said, Encode::MIME::Header has those restrictions;

* the Encode API
* RFC 2047

 I'm not sure if Encode::MIME::Header is the best place to
implement RFC 2231 because RFC 2231 encoding/decoding involves two
parameters, 'MIME charset' and 'language'.  RFC 2231 is used not only
for email/news messages but also in http header.

I agree and I don't think I would use Encode::MIME::Header practically and extensively, much less making it a de facto (and alas, de jure) standard. I made that module for the sheer sake of TMTOWTDI.

To be more precise, decode('MIME-Header', $octet) is good enough for the practical use because it does both B and Q with any encoding between =?? (so long as the encoding therein is supported, of course). But encode('MIME-Header', $octet) lack controls most people would want; You can't choose character encoding and it is always =?UTF-8?. Though this is still practical enough for modern mailers, I know some old mailers can handle only =?ISO-2022-JP? and such.

But once again, You don't have be stuck in Encode::MIME::Header. It's just one of more ways to do it (Though it seems to be more practical than MIME::QuotedPrint when it comes to header encoding since Encode::MIME::Header also does line foldings).

Is there any volunteer to write MIME::Header ? There is MIME::Head already, included in authors/id/E/ER/ERYQ/MIME-tools-5.411a but does it do header encoding? (I pretty much doubt that but I am CCing this to eryq(_at_)zeegee(_dot_)com anyway) Me? I'm already exhausted with Encode as a whole...

Dan the Encode Maintainer