Re: Yahoo and upper-bit-set character encoding

On 2 Oct 2015 as I do recall,
          Matthew Phillips  wrote:

> In message <868ed90855.harriet@...>
>  on 25 Sep 2015 Harriet Bazley  wrote:
>
> > I'm sending/receiving e-mails with German content to a user with a
> > Yahoo.co.uk e-mail address (no idea what software she is using; the
> > Message IDs are in the form .JavaMail.yahoo@...), and every
> > time she quotes one of my messages, all the non-ASCII characters in the
> > German text get translated to a pair of upper-bit-set characters - e.g.
> > o-umlaut becomes CHR$(195) plus CHR$(182).   Obviously this makes
> > communication of foreign text extremely difficult....
>
> In UTF-8 o-umlaut should be encoded as 0xC3 0xB6, i.e. CHR$(195) plus
> CHR$(182) so it sounds like your message has reached her OK, but is perhaps
> getting double encoded before it is sent back.
>
> You need to check the headers for the Content-Type, both the message you
> sent to her, and the messages you receive back.  It said:
>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> for the message you sent to this list.  I don't know whether Messenger
> modifies the "charset" value if you include umlauts in the message.

Apparently it does; my message to her has the headers Content-Type:
text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 and Content-Transfer-Encoding:
quoted-printable, whereas other messages default to text-plain.

Her message has the headers Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 and
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable, but is sent as a multi-part
message with an HTML attachment. The HTML portion is set as text/html;
charset=UTF-8 and is just as unreadable as the plaintext portion.   :-(


[snip]

> I get the impression that anything she writes to you comes through OK,
> it's just when she quotes your messages.  But you were not explicit about
> whether she is using umlauts.
>
Interestingly, I can't find any example where she *does* use umlauts in
material that she has typed herself: in the one place where it is
unavoidable (when she cites the word "zurücklegen") she has used the
acceptable typewriter-era workaround of adding an E to the vowel, e.g.
zuruecklegen.  Otherwise she would appear to make a conscious point of
avoiding having to use them.

This suggests to me that she is using an interface that doesn't understand
non-ASCII characters...  I could do the same, but since most of the
quotations are being cut and pasted from existing material it would involve
an annoying large amount of editing before I send off the queries.   :-(

-- 
Harriet Bazley                     ==  Loyaulte me lie ==

Profanity is the one language all programmers know best.

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