Re: [Nmh-workers] General question - unsupported charset conversion

[Ken Hornstein]

>Look, software cannot read minds.  People would like it to, but I don't
>work for the NSA, so I don't buy into that concept.  We have standards.
>For a reason.  To eliminate ambiguity.  MIME has been around for how
>many years now?  There is no excuse in this day and age for any software
>to generate syntactically incorrect MIME content.

Here's the case I'm thinking about:

- You're running in an ISO-8859-1 locale.  This is permitted, no one questions
  this.
- You get a MIME message that contains the following header:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename*=UTF-8''%F0%9F%92%A9.jpg

  This is a perfectly valid MIME header, formatted correctly by the MIME
  standards.  There is no ambiguity here, no brain damage.  Everything's
  above-board.

What, exactly, should I do with this MIME parameter?  When you decode
that and feed that to iconv() to convert it from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1,
you're going to get EILSEQ as an error.  But this is not the sender's
fault; they followed the rules (that's assuming I did the MIME
formatting correctly; I was doing it by hand.  Pretend that I got it
right, for the sake of this discussion).

--Ken