Re: [Nmh-workers] base64 ... just looking for advice

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear David,

In message <address@hidden> you wrote:
> Hymie wrote:
> 
> > So I'm just wondering what other people are doing.  Are you going into
> > your raw email, stripping out HTML, undecoding base64, removing extra
> > "multipart" parts, things like that?
> 
> See mhfixmsg(1) in nmh 1.6 or the current git repo.  Its main motivation was 
> to allow grepping of messages.

Thanks for this great hint!

Hm... I still have problems understanding how to use mhfixmsg, though.

Assume I have an incoming multipart message with parts like these:

Part 1:
        Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
        Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Part 2:
        Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"
        Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

The "file" command identifies the whole message as "ASCII text", which
makes sense, as it has only 7 bit characters.


Conversion attempt 1:

        $ mhfixmsg +inbox 174 -decodetext 8bit -verbose -outfile ...
        mhfixmsg: 174 part 2, decode text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
        mhfixmsg: 174 part 1, decode text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"

The resulting file is identified by "file" as "ISO-8859 text, with
very long lines"; it basically looks OK, except that I actually would
prefer to have it converted to UTF8 instead.

Conversion attempt 2:

        $ mhfixmsg +inbox 174 -decodetext 8bit -textcharset utf8 -verbose 
-outfile ...

The resulting file is identified by "file" as "Non-ISO extended-ASCII
text, with very long lines".  Opening the file in "vim" shows that all
the 8 bit characters like the German umlaut characters are wrong;
the quoted-printable encoded "f=FCr" for example was not converted
into "für" as expected, but instead into "für".

What is needed to properly decode everything into UTF8?


Thanks in advance.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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