Re: messages in mutt: \225 etc

[Lucas Bergman <lucas@fivesight.com>]

Clive Menzies <clive@clivemenzies.co.uk> writes:

> Monique Y. Herman writes:
>
> > I have a feeling that I should know this, but I don't, and I'm not quite
> > sure how to google for the answer.  Any insight would be greatly
> > appreciated.
> > 
> > I occasionally view a message I've received in mutt and see the following:
> > 
> > \225We have new reversible jerseys.
> > 
> > (The \225 being of note, not the reversible jerseys.)
> > 
> > What is this, and how can I view it properly?
>
> It looks like an ascii code for "a" with an acute accent but seems
> unlikely in this context.

Actually Latin 1, not ASCII.  (ASCII only contains characters from
\000 to \177 inclusive.)

> > Details that may be relevant:
> > 
> > At least in one message's case, 'v' in mutt shows the content as
> > text/plain, 7bit, us-ascii 

Well, we know that's bogus since \225 has the eighth bit set.

In the "Windows 1252" character set, \225 represents a "bullet", which
seems likely to be the intention here.  See:

  http://www.jwz.org/docs/charsets.html

Of course, many (most?) mail clients that writes messages in Windows
1252 fail to *say so* in the content-type field.  This problem exists
in web pages, too, but we're not noticing it as much anymore, since
Mozilla has gotten quite good at guessing funny Microsoft character
sets and doing the Right Thing.

Lucas
-- 
Lucas Bergman <lucas@fivesight.com>
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