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

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Andy,

> I may be alone in this, but I'm a more traditional Unix user.

I think I'm in that set too;  regular ed and dc user.  :-)

> If there is something that doesn't work the way I want, I use a
> filter...

    $ ls ~/bin | wc -l
    295

> For this particular problem, would iconv(1) work to convert texts from
> one encoding to the other?

Yep, it's the same code, packaged differently, and with a bit more
overhead.

> Maybe iconv support could be integrated as a command to run for
> support rather than a library linkage?

I think most of us would prefer the library, and code to use it is
already written.  :-)  Plus, with the world that matters, e.g. not Java,
moving evermore to UTF-8, a lot of the time it isn't needed.

As a Unix fan, would it help you consider switching from C to UTF-8 if
you knew its history, if you don't already.  Ken Thompson and Rob Pike
cooked it up in a cafe close to Murray Hill to fix the problems with the
original UTF.
    https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RobPikeTheHuman/posts/Rz1udTvtiMg
Plan 9 used it throughout.  I've found switching to it is better for
most things.  For those where it's not, I've

    $ cat ~/bin/C
    #! /bin/sh

    # LC_ALL has precedence over LANG according to POSIX[1], but we may as
    # well stamp out any traces by setting LANG too.
    # 1.  The Open Group Base Specifications, Ch. 8 Environment Variables.

    LC_ALL=C LANG=C exec "$@"
    $

so I can `C grep ...' when needed.

Cheers, Ralph.