Re: Avoiding double encoding in subject

[Michael Piotrowski <mxp@dynalabs.de>]

On 2006-07-26 Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> wrote:

> when replying to an article who's subject contains an unknown (or
> invalid) encoding...

[...]

> I'm not sure how Gnus should handle this situation.  Some
> possibilities:

[...]

> (2) Gnus' decoder could replace the unknown/invalid characters with a
>     replacement character ("?", U+FFFD = REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, ...).
>
>     Problem: It's probably not possible to get the number of
>     replacement characters right.

Something like option (2) plus user interaction might be the right
approach:

Gnus detects a RFC 2047-encoded string in a header.  If the charset is
known, everything is fine and it's decoded.  If the charset is
unknown, ask the user, e.g.:

  Unknown charset "iso-8859-17" in Subject header, what now? (c, u or C-h):

The user could then either type "c" and specify a charset which should
be used to interpret it or type "u" to accept it as unknown; in this
case I'd simply replace each octet with the replacement character
since there is now way to find out the character size of an unknown
encoding.

Greetings

-- 
Michael Piotrowski, M.A.                               <mxp@dynalabs.de>
Public key at <http://www.dynalabs.de/mxp/pubkey.txt>