Re: [Nmh-workers] error: mhshow: unable to convert character set

[Eric Gillespie]

Ken Hornstein <address@hidden> writes:

> pretty bogus is nmh simply aborting; I think this is another data
> point that says for every character set conversion we need to put in
> substitution characters; aborting is simply not reasonable.  If people
> disagree, let's hear the reasons (the character set conversion in nmh
> is pretty scattershot; it all needs to be incorporated into a library
> routine so the handling is uniform).  Thoughts from others?

Yes, please :)

I tried this message in MH-E and mutt.  Both actually tried to
render it, which surprised me.  MH-E didn't do too badly, but
mutt actually corrupted the terminal!

MH-E showed me this garbage:

> You wrote 17 июнÑ\217 2014 г., 11:41:35:

I don't know how that will come across; they're some kind of
Unicode characters, plus "\217", but not the ones Ken sent.
The "\217" is not literally that text, it's Emacs saying "hey, I
have this byte that is not valid in this buffer's encoding"; it's
treated as a single character by e.g. cursor movement / text
selection commands.

Anyway, replacing bad characters with '?' seems preferable to me,
especially since for nmh there's a terminal to corrupt, as mutt
foolishly did...

Thanks.