Re: [MacPerl] sending MIME encoded EMail

[Joel Rees <joel_rees@sannet.ne.jp>]

>Below you'll find an example MacPerl program which uses a MIME
>scheme to safely transfer european language characters through email.
>

(clipped)

What you're doing, here, Axel, is converting between character sets 
(speaking loosely). Many modern browsers will do some of this for us, so 
we tend to forget that character sets have been developed in many 
countries (and smaller contexts) to meet many different needs. 

Let me tell you about shift-JIS sometime. It's another of those Microsfot 
sponsored almost-good-ideas. How would you like to have two different 
character codes for "7" and none for umlaut-anything? Same font, same set 
of character codes, but you often have to convert between full- and 
half-width versions of the same characters. (That's double and regular 
width to westerners). But it almost meets the current Japanese needs, and 
they mostly don't seem to care. You can't parse it backwards reliably, 
you can't do isdigit() (sorry about the C reference) on the Japanese 
characters and get sensible results unless you build your own library. 
Oh. I'm already telling you.

If you're still confused, what you need to pin down is the concept of 
"character set" (a non-unique set of encodings for a set of characters 
from a specific context) and the various places our internet software do 
and do not convert between character sets for us. The grand unifying 
UNICODE may solve some of these problems for us, but it will introduce 
some new ones. UTF-8 may help resolve some of the UNICODE problems, but, 
uhmm, I'm rambling.

joel_rees@sannet.ne.jp

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