Re: Displaying different character sets on console

[Aidan Kehoe]

 Ar an séú lá is fiche de mí Eanair, scríobh Adam Sjøgren: 

 > I am curious as to why the headers specify a Japanese charset to
 > tranfer Greek letters?

Because Mule was implemented in a way that’s very friendly to ISO 2022,
which specified a universal character encoding a couple of decades before
Unicode. So the natural Mule way to encode a non-ASCII character in a mail
is to write it using ISO 2022 and to specify iso-2022 as the MIME
charset. (The -jp is defaulted to because Mule was implemented in Japan; it
could equivalently be -kr or -cn.)

Of course, outside East Asia, very little software understands ISO 2022, and
for the sake of recipients’ clients’ it should have used iso-8859-7 or
UTF-8.

-- 
“Ah come on now Ted, a Volkswagen with a mind of its own, driving all over
the place and going mad, if that’s not scary I don’t know what is.”