Reading non-ascii characters, recognise an encoding

Reading non-ascii characters, recognise an encoding

[Andrew Torda]

I sometimes have trouble (maybe always) reading mail from some
Europeans with their representation of non-ascii characters.
Typically, a word looks like
   f=FCr
whereas they intend it to look like 
   fur
with two dots (umlaut) over the "u".
Their mail header says that the message is iso-8859-1 encoding,
so I read all the info pages and tried every command I could find
which would force the buffer to that encoding.
It does not seem to make any difference.
I found an info page which suggested I should add a line at the
top of the file, like
-*-coding: iso-8859-1-*-
but closing and re-visiting the file did not seem to help.

Less important is that their mailer puts an equals "=" sign at
the end of every line. I suspect this is part of their machine
trying to encode the message.

Is there any correct command that can persuade emacs to eat all
the =XX type representations and convert them to something more
readable ?
This is happening with emacs 21.1.
Many thanks
Andrew Torda

Re: Reading non-ascii characters, recognise an encoding

[Heinz Rommerskirchen]

Andrew Torda <torda@zbh.uni-hamburg.de> writes:

> I sometimes have trouble (maybe always) reading mail from some
> Europeans with their representation of non-ascii characters.
> Typically, a word looks like
>    f=FCr
> whereas they intend it to look like 
>    fur
> with two dots (umlaut) over the "u".
> Their mail header says that the message is iso-8859-1 encoding,

They (or more probable their mail program) lied, 'f=FCr' is *not* latin-1
but quoted-printable. See the page 'Article Washing' in the Gnus info,
especially the entry 'W q'.


-- 
Regards

Heinz

Re: Reading non-ascii characters, recognise an encoding

[Kai Großjohann]

Andrew Torda <torda@zbh.uni-hamburg.de> writes:

> I sometimes have trouble (maybe always) reading mail from some
> Europeans with their representation of non-ascii characters.
> Typically, a word looks like
>    f=FCr
> whereas they intend it to look like 
>    fur
> with two dots (umlaut) over the "u".

RMAIL does not grok MIME, Gnus does grok MIME.  What are you using to
read mail?

(The above looks like the quoted-printable MIME encoding to pass 8bit
characters through 7bit pipes.)

kai
-- 
~/.signature is: umop 3p!sdn    (Frank Nobis)

Re: Reading non-ascii characters, recognise an encoding

[Ivan Kanis]

Use vm to read your e-mail it displays european mail just fine.

Ivan.