Re: Change of SM default_charset to UTF-8

I'm just and user, not a developer, so I admit that you know it better, but:

On 2009. május 4. 15.29.35 Petr Hroudný wrote:
> 2009/5/4 Németh Tamás <[email protected]>:
> > Instead of switching every language to utf-8, I would suggest to enable
> > system admins to set the charset for the currently used language, not
> > just the default_charset,
>
> This is totally impossible - you need to convert all locales, all
> helpfiles and modify
> functions/i18n.php for that. Translated strings in e.g. latin-2 charset
> can't be properly displayed in latin-1 and vice versa. That's why
> default_charset can only be configured with English, where all strings are
> plain 7-bit ASCII.

According to my observations, locale files contain charset information, so 
SquirrelMail (or php behind the scenes) can do a charset translation on the 
fly. For example, I created utf-8 .mo files, and simply copied them into a 
plain ISO-8859-2 SM 1.4.17 installation, and all the messages were diplayed 
correctly. In addition to this SM can display even chinese characters (in 
mails) on an ISO-8859-2 installation, since the mails also do contain charset 
information, and characters outside your charset are inserted (by or php 
behind the scenes, I don't know) into the generated HTML page in a &#N; form 
where N is the unicode code point. The only problem I observed was, that I was 
unable to answer other messages than the ones composed in the same charset as 
mine, however lossy_encoding provides a PARTIAL solution for this problem.

> Your only choices are:
>  1. broken emails, or
>  2. UTF-8.
>
> There's no third option, sorry. Even lossy_encoding won't help - try
> replying to russian email and you'll get a screen full of ?????????.

Yes, I know, but you would be able to correctly reply mails which are utf-8 
encoded, but doesn't contain any character not in you charset, and this wold 
be a big advantage.

> To sum up - the sooner we switch to UTF-8, the better. Any modern webmail
> is doing exactly that. BTW, Fedora SM packages are converted to UTF-8 for
> years and known to work fine.

You're right but It can be painful to change charset on an existing 
installation, as I've explained before.


Regards,

Tamás

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