Rails - Dec 2005 - Receiving windows-1252 or iso-8859-1 via TMail

My ActionMailer receives emails fine. I can access the headers, body and 
attachment(s). However, this only works flawlessly when the emails are 
in the US-ASCII charset:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed


When they''re either in windows-1252 or iso-8859-1, the non-ascii 
characters are misrepresented or simply printed as question marks. Has 
anyone succesfully received emails in charsets other than US-ASCII? No 
API docs, manuals or wikis mention this. The only TMail doc I could find 
(from 2004) mentions that the author is not planning to add i17n (sic) 
support because it''s too complex for him. I don''t know what
that means.


As an aside, internationalisation and hi-ascii character sets seem to be 
an afterthought in Rails. Am I alone in this?

-- 
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On Dec 8, 2005, at 9:52 AM, joost baaij wrote:
> My ActionMailer receives emails fine. I can access the headers, body 
> and
> attachment(s). However, this only works flawlessly when the emails are
> in the US-ASCII charset:
>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
>
>
> When they''re either in windows-1252 or iso-8859-1, the non-ascii
> characters are misrepresented or simply printed as question marks. Has
> anyone succesfully received emails in charsets other than US-ASCII? No
> API docs, manuals or wikis mention this. The only TMail doc I could 
> find
> (from 2004) mentions that the author is not planning to add i17n (sic)
> support because it''s too complex for him. I don''t know
what that means.
I have not actually done it, but check out the Mailr project.  I believe
Luben has code in it to properly handle other encodings.
> As an aside, internationalisation and hi-ascii character sets seem to 
> be
> an afterthought in Rails. Am I alone in this?
A debate hashed out numerous times on the list, search the archives for
various points of view.

-- 
Scott Barron
Lunchbox Software
http://lunchboxsoftware.com
http://lunchroom.lunchboxsoftware.com
http://rubyi.st

joost wrote:
> My ActionMailer receives emails fine. I can access the headers, body and 
> attachment(s). However, this only works flawlessly when the emails are 
> in the US-ASCII charset:
> 
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
> 
> 
> When they''re either in windows-1252 or iso-8859-1, the non-ascii 
> characters are misrepresented or simply printed as question marks.
The mailer converts all received mails to UTF-8.
> Has 
> anyone succesfully received emails in charsets other than US-ASCII?
Yes. www.ruby-forum.com receives all kind of weird charsets.
> No 
> API docs, manuals or wikis mention this. The only TMail doc I could find 
> (from 2004) mentions that the author is not planning to add i17n (sic) 
> support because it''s too complex for him. I don''t know
what that means.
I''m afraid the TMail delivered with Rails doesn''t have too
much in
common with the original TMail anymore. Unfortunately I haven''t seen
any
efforts to merge the changes into the original TMail.
> As an aside, internationalisation and hi-ascii character sets seem to be 
> an afterthought in Rails. Am I alone in this?
There is no problem with character sets.

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

andreas wrote:
> The mailer converts all received mails to UTF-8.
Ouch! The blinding flash of insight just hit me. Thanks so much, with 
this info I could solve the issue immediately. Since my tables/model are 
in iso-8859-1 and no way for me to change that, I simply convert the 
UTF-8 and all is good.

The relevant snippet:

require ''iconv''
# Receive a message
def receive(email)
  # Transcode to iso-8859-1
  body = Iconv.new(''iso-8859-1'',
''utf-8'').iconv(email.body)

  # handle the email...
end

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2005/12/10, Andreas Schwarz <f@andreas-s.net>:
> > No
> > API docs, manuals or wikis mention this. The only TMail doc I could
find
> > (from 2004) mentions that the author is not planning to add i17n (sic)
> > support because it''s too complex for him. I don''t
know what that means.
I have talked with Minero about I18n in TMail. He said
he would support I18N when Ruby supports it.
For example, when you encode a long subject, you should split
a string correctly. But in current Ruby, you can do it only in
ASCII, UTF-8, EUC-JP and Shift_JIS with NKF (I guess
Iconv does not use for spliting a string with correct character
boundary, right?).
> I''m afraid the TMail delivered with Rails doesn''t have
too much in
> common with the original TMail anymore. Unfortunately I haven''t
seen any
> efforts to merge the changes into the original TMail.
In RubyConf2005, Minero and DHH had talked about TMail
(mainly license, not merging).
> > As an aside, internationalisation and hi-ascii character sets seem to
be
> > an afterthought in Rails. Am I alone in this?
gorou-san have developed ActiveHeart plugin, Japanization module for Rails
(ActiveRecrod and ActionMailer). It''s like hack, but very useful for
Japanese
Railers.

http://svn.rails2u.com/public/plugins/trunk/active_heart/

If you want to handle some encodings (not every encodings), plug-in
approch is not so bad. Complete I18N framework is not easy (and fun),
like complete login framework.

Regards,

Masayoshi Takahashi

Iconv has its limits, but working internally with UTF-8 is probably the 
best way to go. Thanks everyone.

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