mutt, ISO-8859-1, and Terminal.app

[Jens Troeger]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 04:05:18PM -0500, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On Sep 9, 2008, at 1:03 PM, Jens Troeger wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 07:49:23AM -1000, Baron Fujimoto wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, 9 Sep 2008, Jens Troeger wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'm running on OS-X 10.4.11 and Terminal version 1.5.1 (133-1).  Just
>>>> recently I installed MacPorts, including mutt-devel so that I can access
>>>> my gmail.com account.  It all works nicely; however, there's one big
>>>> annoyance: ISO-8859-1 text.  Some strings in the email header contain
>>>> such characters:
>>>>
>>>>   From: "=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Bla Bl=ECn?=" < bla at bla >
>>>>
>>>> and that's exactly what I see in my email list in mutt.  No actual name
>>>> with language specific characters, but instead this blob of undecoded
>>>> string.
>>>
>>>
>>> Is that a properly encoded header?  Section 2 of RFC 2047 says,
>>>
>>>    IMPORTANT: 'encoded-word's are designed to be recognized as 'atom's
>>>    by an RFC 822 parser.  As a consequence, unencoded white space
>>>    characters (such as SPACE and HTAB) are FORBIDDEN within an
>>>    'encoded-word'.  For example, the character sequence
>>>
>>>       =?iso-8859-1?q?this is some text?=
>>>
>>>    would be parsed as four 'atom's, rather than as a single 'atom' (by
>>>    an RFC 822 parser) or 'encoded-word' (by a parser which understands
>>>    'encoded-words').  The correct way to encode the string "this is some
>>>    text" is to encode the SPACE characters as well, e.g.
>>>
>>>       =?iso-8859-1?q?this=20is=20some=20text?=
>>>
>>> and later in section 6.3:
>>>
>>>    A mail reader need not attempt to display the text associated with an
>>>    'encoded-word' that is incorrectly formed.
>>>
>>> <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2047.txt>
>>>
>>>> Does anybody have an idea what's going on here, and how I can fix that?
>>>
>>> I don't know if this is the source of the problem, but it caught my eye.
>>
>> Sorry, I wanted to protect the name encoded in that string, and messed
>> it up.  The string that's failing is this one:
>>
>>   "=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Mia_Det=ECn?="
>>
>> So that would be a correct string then?
>
> Yes. It decodes to "Mia_Detìn". See:
>
> php -r 'echo 
> utf8_encode(mb_decode_mimeheader("=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Mia_Det=ECn?=")) . "\n";'
>
> So could it be that mutt does not support RFC 822-/2047-style subject 
> encoding? You'll have to ask the developers of mutt what's going on here.

The mutt that's running on my Linux box does the encoding right, that's
why I originally thought it's a Terminal problem on my Mac.  Maybe
there's a compiler option I didn't set, or an env variable?

Jens

-- 
Jens Troeger
http://savage.light-speed.de/