[Mailman-Users] Non-ASCII signs in welcome text

[Mark Sapiro]

Hendrik Maryns wrote:
> 
> I just started a new mailing list with Mailman.  The welcome_msg is in
> German and contains üäö.  Then I subscribed myself to the list and got
> the following:
> 
> Hallöchen, Beiträge erwünscht, aber übertreibt es
> nicht, ne.


What is the list's preferred language? If it is English (or if it was
English when you set the welcome_msg), this is expected because
Mailman's character set for English is us-ascii and the page you're
posting from was sent with charset=us-ascii so your browser sends the
non-ascii characters as numeric html entities.

If the list's preferred language is German, whose charset is iso-8859-1,
when you set the welcome_msg, this should not happen.


> Furthermore, if I know log into the admin area, it gives the same text,
> that is, with all non-ASCII replaced by entities!


The reason you see the numeric HTML entities rather that the browser's
rendering of them is over-protective escaping of the '&' in the HTML
entity, but in this case, that's actually appropriate because the
ultimate use of this message is in a plain text email where the HTML
entities won't be rendered as characters anyway.

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