Followup regarding "Unrecognized character set: windows-1252" messages

[Will Bryant <will@core-dev.co.nz>]

Just a followup regarding the (harmless) warning messages about 
unrecognised character sets, most often windows-1252 (for the benefit of 
those looking through the archives - see the bottom if you just want the 
what-to-do summary):

As noted previously on this list, even after adding (say) windows-1252 to 
your <CharsetConverters>, one still continues to see warning 
messages.  These are from mhtxtplain.pl, which doesn't use 
<CharsetConverters> fully (although it prolly should (Earl said he couldn't 
remember why it doesn't - 
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/mhonarc/2000-11/msg00045.html)).

In response to Earl's message, Robert Hsiung asked 
(http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/mhonarc/2000-11/msg00048.html) if 
he should modify the lines:
      ## Check MIMECharSetConverters if charset should be left alone
      if (defined($readmail::MIMECharSetConverters{$charset}) and
	    $readmail::MIMECharSetConverters{$charset} eq "-decode-") {
	$asis{$charset} = 1;
      }
in mhtxtplain.pl to:
      ## Check MIMECharSetConverters if charset should be left alone
      if (defined($readmail::MIMECharSetConverters{$charset})) {
	$asis{$charset} = 1;
      }
While this would work fine, it does of course require that you redo any 
modifications to the code when you upgrade, etc, and there is a cleaner way 
to do it:

Instead you can accomplish exactly the same thing by supplying the 'asis' 
parameter using <MIMEArgs>, without needing any modifications to the perl 
script.  For example, I changed mine from

<MIMEArgs>
text/*: maxwidth=80
text/plain: maxwidth=80
</MIMEArgs>

to:

<MIMEArgs>
text/*: maxwidth=80
text/plain: maxwidth=80 asis=windows-1252:iso-8859-15
</MIMEArgs>

We're changing text/plain because that's the important one where (for me at 
least) mhtxtplain.pl was being used.  I'm not sure if the asis parameter 
should be supplied for any of the other types that use mhtxtplain.pl, I 
haven't seemed to need to so far.

(as you can see I'm suppressing warnings about windows-1252 and 
iso-8859-15; the maxwidth stuff has nothing to do with the current 
discussion, I need it for other reasons).


So to summarise, you need to do two things to stop warning messages about 
unrecognised character sets: add it to <CharsetConverters> 
(http://www.mhonarc.org/MHonArc/doc/resources/charsetconverters.html), and 
also modify your <MIMEArgs> for text/plain to add the 'asis' option.  See 
below for an example (what I use).

As far as the action that will be taken with these character sets when you 
supply 'asis' as above, aside from not printing the warning message any 
longer, they will be dealt with (as far as I can see) in exactly the same 
way - simply encoded for HTML entities (<, >, ") and otherwise left 
unmodified.  Thus this is a pretty safe thing to do AFAIK, for character 
sets such as windows-1252 at least, it shouldn't introduce any nasty behaviour.

For example, the relevant resources in the .rc file I use are:

<CharsetConverters>
windows-1252;   mhonarc::htmlize;
</CharsetConverters>

<MIMEFilters>
message/delivery-status;   m2h_text_plain::filter;      mhtxtplain.pl
message/partial;           m2h_text_plain::filter;      mhtxtplain.pl
text/*;                    m2h_text_plain::filter;      mhtxtplain.pl
text/enriched;             m2h_text_enriched::filter;   mhtxtenrich.pl
text/html;                 m2h_text_html::filter;       mhtxthtml.pl
text/plain;                m2h_text_plain::filter;      mhtxtplain.pl
text/richtext;             m2h_text_enriched::filter;   mhtxtenrich.pl
text/x-html;               m2h_text_html::filter;       mhtxthtml.pl
</MIMEFilters>

<MIMEArgs>
text/*: maxwidth=80
text/plain: maxwidth=80 asis=windows-1252:iso-8859-15
</MIMEArgs>

YMMV.

_______________________________________________________________________
Will Bryant, will@core-dev.co.nz                    cell +64 21 655 443
http://www.core-dev.co.nz/    Personal: http://www.core-dev.co.nz/will/
ShareChat Ltd. technical manager            http://www.sharechat.co.nz/
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