Re: mhfixmsg character set conversion

[George Michaelson]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 10:50 AM Steven Winikoff <smw@smwonline.ca> wrote:

>Try ‘:se fileencoding?’ when vim-ing good and again with bad.

Good point:

   $ vim good
   :set fileencoding
   fileencoding=utf-8

   $ vim bad
   :set fileencoding
   fileencoding=latin1


>I expect the bad file has something earlier on which fixes vim's idea of
>the encoding to ISO 8859-1

That does seem to be the case.  Do you have any idea what kind of thing
that might be?  (I know you can't diagnose a file you haven't seen, but in
general, what sorts of things should I look for?)

Typically for me (at least) bad encoded files have been processed to find 'thing' and converted to the Microsoft belief you meant to use the real pair of quote marks they prefer.  processed by super-smart software. the worst kind. "I was only trying to help" software.

Cut/Paste of text in from a web browser can trigger this. 

I usually see it doing python file read. I have to remember to brute-force open as UTF-8 or else python does what it thinks is needful and marks the stream as binary, and not suitable for use in the str() function suite.

-G