Subject: Force Pine to use another character set

From: "Wei C. Lin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 20:27:37 -0400

Hi,

	Does someone know how to configure and force Pine to use
ISO-8859-1 character set to display incoming mails, even though it's
indicated within the mails US-ASCII is being used as character set? and
how to force Pine to "think" the encoding is QUOTED-PRINTABLE?

		Thanks

Lin

---

From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 19:41:45 -0400

> how to force Pine to "think" the encoding is QUOTED-PRINTABLE?

    Actually, Pine mostly just takes the raw characters and passes them
unchanged to the display, which may, of course, be on the other end of
a communications link.  It is up to the display device actually to
convert the bit patterns of the input into properly displayed
characters.

    For example, I use a DOS desktop computer dialed in to a Un*x
server.  It is my computer's current code page which actually
determines what I see, not Pine.  I can, and occasionally do, change
code pages on one and the same message and see different things.

    Notice that I said "Pine mostly...".  If the headers say that the
message is in Quoted-Printable format and Pine finds =xx in the
message, it will convert it to the corresponding 8-bit pattern and then
pass that through.  Again, what you actually see for such a character
depends on your display device, as Pine is no longer in the picture at
that point.

    I'm not sure what you mean by forcing Pine to "think" the encoding
is Quoted-Printable.  Do you mean that there are Quoted-Printable forms
in the message but no header to tell Pine so (as can happen if the
headers get mashed), so that you are seeing =xx instead of a character?

    1)  If this is so, 2) if you are using Pine on a Un*x system, and 3)
if Perl 5 is installed on the system, then you can do the following:

a)  Put the following one-line Perl 5 program in a directory in your
    $PATH:

perl5 -pe 's/\=([0-9A-Fa-f]{2})/chr(hex($1))/ge; s/\=\n//;'

b)  Make it executable and do a rehash;

c)  In your Pine configuration, make sure the pipe command is enabled;

d)  When you see =xx Quoted-Printable forms that you want the "real"
    characters for, invoke the pipe command (|) and use the name of
    the Perl 5 program above; it will convert the Quoted-Printable
    forms into the "real" characters, which will be up to your display
    to show correctly;

e)  Be sure to exit from the Piped Message screen before you try to do
    anything else with the message.

Paul                             <[email-masked]>
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Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA
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