Re: coding-system difficulties

[Cyprian Laskowski <swagbelly@yahoo.com>]

kai.grossjohann@uni-duisburg.de (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> Sometimes, the charset header is bogus.  You can type `1 g' then
> enter the charset to force Gnus to use a different charset.

Wow, I didn't know about that feature: neat.  However, for some
reason, it doesn't work for me in this case; or maybe I'm missing
something.  Here's some more details:

I wrote the following function to facilitate matters a bit (I wonder
if functions/interfaces for these sorts of investigations already
exist in splendid form?):

(defun list-buffer-coding-systems-and-charsets ()
  "Show list of charsets and possible coding systems for the buffer."
  (interactive)
  (let ((charsets (find-charset-region (point-min) (point-max))))
    (pop-to-buffer "*Coding Systems*")
    (erase-buffer)
    (mapc (lambda (charset)
            (insert "Charset: "
                    (symbol-name charset)
                    "\n"
                    "Coding systems: "
                    (prin1-to-string
                     (find-coding-systems-for-charsets
                      (list charset)))
                    "\n\n"))
          charsets)))

Now, to be concrete, if I run this function on a certain *Article*
buffer with Greek text, it yields this:

,----
| Charset: ascii
| Coding systems: (undecided)
`----

But if I save the article in a file with the command sequence
mentioned before, and rerun the function from that buffer, I get:

,----
| Charset: ascii
| Coding systems: (undecided)
| 
| Charset: greek-iso8859-7
| Coding systems: (iso-2022-jp-2 greek-iso-8bit tibetan-iso-8bit-with-esc thai-tis620-with-esc lao-with-esc korean-iso-8bit-with-esc japanese-iso-8bit-with-esc hebrew-iso-8bit-with-esc greek-iso-8bit-with-esc iso-latin-9-with-esc iso-latin-8-with-esc iso-latin-5-with-esc iso-latin-4-with-esc iso-latin-3-with-esc iso-latin-2-with-esc iso-latin-1-with-esc in-is13194-devanagari-with-esc cyrillic-iso-8bit-with-esc chinese-iso-8bit-with-esc compound-text iso-2022-8bit-ss2 iso-2022-7bit-lock iso-2022-7bit-ss2 iso-2022-7bit raw-text emacs-mule no-conversion)
`----

Now when I try `1 g greek-iso8859-7 RET' I still get unreadable text.
I even tried exhaustively running through all the charsets associated
with the greek-iso8859-7-compatible coding-systems listed above, but
still none of them was successful.  I don't understand what's
happening here, since obviously is able to render the text correctly
(as in the file).

Incidentally, here are content-type-related header lines in the
message, as far as I can tell.

,----
| MIME-Version: 1.0
| Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="0-1503940496-1037189069=:69315"
| Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
| X-Content-Length: 4518
`----

As an aside, I wonder: is there a way (perhaps in BBDB) to associate a
person with a charset, or coding-system or something?  Then when you
read a message from that person, or write a messag to them, the
correct setup is used, and you're totally in business.

Thanks to everyone for all the responses so far, as well as any more
to come. :)


cyp