Tony Finch - no-longer-simple mail transport protocol
created 16 September 2006 in links tagged charactersets, smtp and utf8.
UTF-8 and other character set excitement in SMTP
using utf-8 in irssi under screen
created 23 June 2005 in blog tagged linux, screen, unicode and utf8.
Firstly, tell your local terminal application that you want a utf-8 window. This is left to you, but under macos (which I use), right click the window, select ‘Window settings’, pick the ‘Display’ option from the drop-down, and pick utf-8 under ‘Character set encoding’.
Next, when you start the screen session, pass the ‘-U’ flag. This has to be passed to a new screen session - you can’t connect to an existing one this way.
screen -U
Alternatively, you can turn on the utf-8 flag for a single existing screen window by typing your hotkey (ctrl-a by default), then ‘:utf8 on’. This is good if you don’t want all of your windows to be utf now.
On the remote machine, make sure that the ‘LANG‘ environment variable is set to something UTF-8 like, for instance, I use
export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
in my .bashrc.
Finally, you need to tell irssi to use UTF-8. Start it up in your new utf-8 window, and type
/set term_type utf-8
Hopefully everything should work now.
More UTF8 pain
created 15 December 2004 in blog tagged browser, unicode and utf8.
Does no-one in the world care about non-ASCII characters? It’s pathetic. I’m trying to make HTML form uploads work for files with non-ASCII characters in their names, and I’m hitting the stupidest problems.
The main bugbear is mozilla - you can’t upload files with wide characters in their names. At all. Piece of shit. Safari seems to be encoding the upload filenames with some made-up encoding that I can’t figure out, so that’s out of luck. At least safari sends the actual contents of the files.
The one browser I’ve tried that works flawlessly is Internet Explorer. Microsoft, at least, seem to care about the non-US market.
UTF8 Openguides
created 13 December 2004 in blog tagged perl, unicode, utf8 and wiki.
I foolishly offered to make OpenGuides UTF-8 safe. Because I don’t do that enough at work, or something. Anyway, it’s going quite well - because I did all the grunt work in CGI::Wiki a while ago, it’s just a matter of finding all the inputs and outputs and making sure they’re encoded properly. So far, the page contents and names are utf-8 safe, along with the cookie preferences, so your username is good. The search stuff looks scary, and there are various broken plugins, etc, etc, so there’s still stuff to do. I should also do the hooks properly - CGI::Wiki should offer nice functions for this stuff.
Anyway, there’s a demo site here in case you feel like trying to break it. The patch against OG is here, out of my svn repository, of course.