Re: Unicode for Pegasus Mail

From: A. Vine (avine@eng.sun.com)
Date: Tue Jan 25 2000 - 14:34:04 EST


Janko Stamenovic wrote:
>
> As far as I know internet mail protocols still can't assume that all 8 bits
> in byte will pass from source to destination, therefore UTF-8 can't be used
> as default code for message body, before the body is MIME-d.
>
> And the implementor actualy asked how to MIME with UTF-8, and for the
> appropriate specs.
>

No problem. When you MIME-ify the message to pass through a 7-bit channel, you
encode the data in base64 (or quoted-printable if there are few bytes with the
8th bit set), and you supply a "Content-transfer-encoding" header with either
"base64" or "quoted-printable" as the value. All values will then be 7-bit.
Obviously you must also have the "Content-type" header with a "charset=utf-8"
parameter. Transfer encodings are not related to character encodings.

Andrea

-- 
Andrea Vine, avine@eng.sun.com, Sun-Netscape Alliance i18n architect
"So I just don't see this as an either-or issue as much as an apples 
are yummy, and oranges are yummy, too, issue, and every now and then
fruit salad is tasty." -- Matthew Wall



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:58 EDT