Subject: Pine 3.91 "cannot unpack 8-bit encoding"? huh?

From: [email-masked] (Steve Robbins)
Date: 7 Dec 1994 16:03:41 -0500

I did look for a FAQ in news.answers, and found none.

Just built pine 3.91 and I really like the way it will unpack MIME
quoted-printable-encoded messages (in the 8859-1 character set) and
display them correctly.

Then I tried to read a NON-encoded, i.e. "Content-Transfer-Encoding:
8-bit" message in the same character set and pine balks.  It won't
display the message, and the multipart viewer claims it doesn't know
how to unpack 8-bit encoding.

Is pine 3.92 due anytime soon?  It shouldn't be too difficult to add
an "8-bit" unpacker. :-)

-- 
                Steve Robbins -- Consultant in Computerology
                         [email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Barry Bouwsma)
Date: 8 Dec 1994 12:41:44 GMT

>how to unpack 8-bit encoding.

    Pine is capable of handling properly tagged C-T-E=8BIT messages.
However, it will say that it does not know how to display messages with
a C-T-E of 8BIT, but a charset of US-ASCII.  I guess that is what you
have gotten.

    One shouldn't be sending out 8-bit messages tagged as US-ASCII, but on
the other hand, since no matter whether the text is truly ASCII or some
8-bit character set, it could simply be passed to the display for viewing,
my gut feeling is that Pine here should be forgiving, in the ``be liberal
about what you accept but conservative in what you send out'' philosophy.

    I have had this happen to me, hacking such headers into mail without
thinking about what I was doing and having Pine complain, but Pine has never
had difficulty displaying C-T-E=8BIT text when tagged as ISO-8859-1 or
KOI8-R or VIDEOTEX-SUPPL or whatever you happen to be using.  Only when
said text arrives claiming to be US-ASCII does Pine take notice.

    At the same time, I've had Pine display the 7-bit equivalent of what had
been 8-bit text when the path has not been fully 8-bit clean, in the case of
reading the KOI8-R relcom news articles from a news server that doesn't feel
it important to preserve the 8th bit, so don't expect that simply by putting
a C-T-E=8BIT header in your news or mail, that the 8th bit will be preserved.

-- 
 Barry Bouwsma, back from Euro-bike-tour in Ann Arbor, Michigan
    Please direct mail to  <[email-masked]> (MIME-aware)
Unemployable System Crasher, seeking work with the Internet that will put me
somewhere near the Appenzell, Switzerland; have pivo and zmrzlina, will travel

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From: [email-masked] (Steve Robbins)
Date: 8 Dec 1994 13:07:13 -0500

>     Pine is capable of handling properly tagged C-T-E=8BIT messages.

You are entirely correct, as was Mark Crispin who emailed me.  

The problem was of course that the message was NOT properly tagged.
The person sending it a content-transfer-encoding of '8-bit' rather
than '8bit'.  Shoulda checked the RFCs first; sigh.