encoding

[Glenn Thobe]

On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 12:14:00PM -0400, Richard Robin wrote:
> ...
> However, question marks are almost always a sign of stuff that originated in
> Unicode and somehow went through a server or mailer that couldn't handle it.
> ...
> Unfortunately, question marks are like Humpty Dumpty. Once you see questions
> marks, you can't put the Cyrillic back together again. It has already been
> trashed.
>
> -Rich
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Elena Boudovskaia" <eboudovs at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU>
> To: <SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>
> Sent: Monday, May 12, 2003 12:03 PM
> Subject: [SEELANGS] encoding
>
>
> > To those who can read e-mail in Russian: what do you need to install to
> read
> > all the encodings? I have Outlook Express with the encodings Cyrillic
> > Windows, Cyrillic ISO, Cyrillic KOI8-R and Cyrillic KOI8-U, and I can read
> > most of the mail. Sometimes, however, an incoming e-mail consists of
> series
> > of question marks, and then I cannot read it in any of the encodings. Some
> > of my students complain that my Russian e-mails look like question marks
> > too. What could the matter be, and how can I fix it?
> >
> > Elena

I can't answer the question of how to configure your OS and mailer (MUA) to
properly compose and send e-mail containing cyrillic text, but I will say that
whatever encoding you use, there is a Content-Type line in your mail header that
tells the reader's mailer what encoding to expect.

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=koi8-r
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1251"
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

When I see gibberish or question marks where I expect to see cyrillic, there is
invariably a conflict between the character set declared and the one actually
used.  Sometimes I can recover the text by editing the charset attribute on the
receiving end.  I hope this helps.

-Glenn Thobe
<thobe at lafn.org>

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