From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Stefan Monnier" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Rmail changes for Emacs 22 Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 16:50:50 -0400 Sender: emacs-devel-admin@gnu.org Message-ID: <200210212050.g9LKoo918062@rum.cs.yale.edu> References: <84ptu33fzw.fsf@crybaby.cs.uni-dortmund.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: main.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1035233447 21941 80.91.224.249 (21 Oct 2002 20:50:47 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 20:50:47 +0000 (UTC) Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org Return-path: Original-Received: from quimby.gnus.org ([80.91.224.244]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 183jVe-0005hl-00 for ; Mon, 21 Oct 2002 22:50:46 +0200 Original-Received: from monty-python.gnu.org ([199.232.76.173]) by quimby.gnus.org with esmtp (Exim 3.12 #1 (Debian)) id 183kPh-0003Wn-00 for ; Mon, 21 Oct 2002 23:48:41 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.10) id 183jWB-0006u5-00; Mon, 21 Oct 2002 16:51:19 -0400 Original-Received: from list by monty-python.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.10) id 183jVn-0006fL-00 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 21 Oct 2002 16:50:55 -0400 Original-Received: from mail by monty-python.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.10) id 183jVl-0006cj-00 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 21 Oct 2002 16:50:54 -0400 Original-Received: from rum.cs.yale.edu ([128.36.229.169]) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.10) id 183jVl-0006bT-00 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 21 Oct 2002 16:50:53 -0400 Original-Received: (from monnier@localhost) by rum.cs.yale.edu (8.11.6/8.11.6) id g9LKoo918062; Mon, 21 Oct 2002 16:50:50 -0400 X-Mailer: exmh version 2.4 06/23/2000 with nmh-1.0.4 Original-To: Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai =?iso-8859-1?q?Gro=DFjohann?=) Errors-To: emacs-devel-admin@gnu.org X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.11 Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Emacs development discussions. List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:8623 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel:8623 > But what do other programs do? Convert all incoming messages to > Unicode? If they read from /var/mail, that might be difficult to > do. Or do other programs just grok multiple charsets (encodings?) in > the same file? > > It would, however, be slightly difficult to keep messages encoded in > ascii and utf-16 in the same file. Hm. But if one keeps > Content-Length headers, say, then one would know that one is looking > at the From_ line. Therefore, one could tell whether those five > characters are encoded in something that looks like ascii or whether > it looks like utf-16. That might be sufficient to find the > Content-type header to be really sure what the charset/encoding is. Much simpler: because the format is basically the format used during transfer, you benefit from the work done on MIME and can reuse the same tricks: the header, for example, is always written in more or less pure ASCII (at least in theory) and any non-ASCII char has to be encoded using the =????= thingy. This way you can unambiguously read the Content-Type and its charset argument. Stefan