How does one cope with missing charsets?

How does one cope with missing charsets?

[era]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1896 bytes --]

I have Gnus 5.8.8 so forgive me if this is improved in newer versions.

Attaching a file with an unknown character set produces a less than
helpful warning.

To repeat, create an empty file, and populate it by evaluating the
following Lisp snippet with M-:

  (let ((i 0)) (while (< i 256) (insert (char-to-string i)) (setq i (1+ i))))

Save the file. Then start composing a new message, and attach the file
you created with C-c C-a.

I get an MMF spec which looks like this ("disarmed").

  [#part charset="utf-8" type="text/plain" filename="/tmp/8bit.txt"
         disposition=attachment
         description="Test file for unknown character set"]
  [#/part]

I have experimentally added the charset= field, but it didn't help
(also tried "unknown", "utf8", and "iso-8859-1"), and indented and
wrapped lines to make it more readable.

Attempting to send this message gives the dreaded warning:

  8-bit characters are found in the message, please specify charset.

Adding a charset= header to the MMF info does not appear to help, as
indicated above.

MMF preview (M-m P) gives the same warning, in case you want to try
without actually sending any message.

The warning message contains no hints on how to proceed and I cannot
find information about how to specify a character set, or even
anything general about how to handle this error. (I believe I have
stumbled over it in other situations in the past, when a quoted
message I was replying to somehow ended up not having a valid
character set. Maybe I don't remember this correctly, though.)

A workaround in some cases is to visit the file in a buffer with the
correct coding system selected, and attach the buffer with M-m b
instead.

/* era */


Gnus v5.8.8
GNU Emacs 20.7.2 (i386-debian-linux-gnu, X toolkit)
 of Fri Apr  5 2002 on cyberhq modified by Debian
200 main.gmane.org InterNetNews NNRP server INN 2.3.2 ready (posting ok).



[-- Attachment #2: User settings --]
[-- Type: application/x-emacs-lisp, Size: 4408 bytes --]

[-- Attachment #3: Type: text/plain, Size: 303 bytes --]


-- 
The email address era     the contact information   Just for kicks, imagine
at iki dot fi is heavily  link on my home page at   what it's like to get
spam filtered.  If you    <http://www.iki.fi/era/>  500 pieces of spam for
want to reach me, see     instead.                  each wanted message.

Re: How does one cope with missing charsets?

[Jesper Harder]

era@iki.fi writes:

> I have Gnus 5.8.8 so forgive me if this is improved in newer
> versions.

I can't reproduce it with the current version, so I guess it has been
fixed.

> I get an MMF spec which looks like this ("disarmed").
>
>   [#part charset="utf-8" type="text/plain" filename="/tmp/8bit.txt"
>          disposition=attachment
>          description="Test file for unknown character set"]
>   [#/part]

As a work-around it'll probably work to specify the encoding in the
MML tag, e.g. "encoding=base64", or to specify the MIME type as
application/octet-stream.

Re: How does one cope with missing charsets?

[Jesper Harder]

[reposting, since this never showed up on news.gnus.org]

era@iki.fi writes:

> I have Gnus 5.8.8 so forgive me if this is improved in newer
> versions.

I can't reproduce it with the current version, so I guess it has been
fixed.

> I get an MMF spec which looks like this ("disarmed").
>
>   [#part charset="utf-8" type="text/plain" filename="/tmp/8bit.txt"
>          disposition=attachment
>          description="Test file for unknown character set"]
>   [#/part]

As a work-around it'll probably work to specify the encoding in the
MML tag, e.g. "encoding=base64", or to specify the MIME type as
application/octet-stream.