[Mailman-Users] encoding problem (french)

[Mark Sapiro]

Tara Star wrote:
>
>Actually, this might work better for you ;-)
>https://secure.swissblogs.com/mailman/listinfo/liste
>
>It's even worse -- there seems to be a mixture of correctly and  
>incorrectly encoded stuff.


The 'correctly encoded' stuff is generated as html escapes as in "Pour
voir tous les messages passés de la liste,...". Thus these
characters will render properly regardless of the encoding as long as
it is a superset of 7-bit us-ascii.

The 'incorrectly encoded' stuff is directly encoded as latin-1
cahracters as in "Un courriel vous parviendra vous demandant une
confirmation, cela empêche que d'autres personnes vous abonnent
impunément." This requires the browser's encoding be set to iso-8859-1
and not to utf-8 to render these characters correctly.

The difference here is the stuff with html escapes comes from the
templates/fr/listinfo.html template and the other comes from
translated messages in messages/fr/LC_MESSAGES/

>> Page declares encoding as UTF-8, but it is actually iso-8859-1
>> (latin-1).


The cgi that generates the page emits a 

Content-Type: text/html; charset=value

header which sets the character encoding for the browser. The charset=
value comes from the LC_DESCRIPTIONS dictionary defined by
add_language entries in Defaults.py/mm_cfg.py. The default for French
is iso-8859-1, but I suspect this was changed to utf-8 in your
installation.

I'm not sure what's going on in detail, and I can't actually view the
tcp/ip traffic directly because it's encrypted, but it seems that the
i18n translation does not change the encoding of the messages so that
the character set of the list can't be just changed to utf-8 without
redoing the french message translations.


--
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan