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On Thursday, July 29 at 11:32 AM, quoth Paul E Condon:
>I'm still having problems. I'd like to read some documentation that 
>expands on what these configuration lines do.

Without a better idea of what you're after, I'd say the Mutt manual is 
the place to look up the definition of charset-hook.

>I can't find any mention of unknown-8bits or x-user-defined in the 
>Mutt E-Mail Client manual.

And you won't; that's just experience talking. I've seen emails that 
label their own charset as "unknown-8bits" or "x-user-defined". For 
example, one of them was generated by pine when the user was trying to  
respond to a utf-8 message; the message had quoted the utf-8 
characters, but pine could only identify them as "not latin-1", and so  
fell back to "unknown-8bits". I forget where I saw x-user-defined... 
the point is, they're bogus character-set labels instituted by 
software that's gotten confused or that doesn't have support for a 
modern charset or both.

> The charset-hook command defines an alias for a character set. This 
> is useful to properly display messages which are tagged with a 
> character set name not known to Mutt.
>
> The iconv-hook command defines a system-specific name for a 
> character set. This is helpful when your systems character 
> conversion library insists on using strange, system-specific names 
> for character sets.
>___________________________
> In this, iconv-hook is described as a method of handling a 
> 'character set name' that is not known to Mutt. Is there a place 
> where I can find a list of the character set names that are known to 
> the copy of Mutt on my machine? Where? How? Or (gently, please) why 
> is this a silly question?

You're right, the distinction is quite fuzzy. The way I would think of 
it is this way:

     charset-hook is used for mapping a weird/unknown/wrong charset
     name onto the "correct" charset name.

     iconv-hook is used for mapping a "correct" charset name onto a
     system-specific one (i.e. if your system is broken).

The example for iconv-hook given in the mutt man page is for 
transforming "iso-8859-1" (i.e. the "correct" name) to a 
system-specific "8859-1". Thus, they can stack: the charset-hook can 
transform latin1 (and many others) into iso-8859-1, and iconv-hook 
munges iso-8859-1 into whatever your system prefers.

In practice, however, I believe you can use them both to achieve the 
same effect. In other words, both can transform latin1 into 8859-1 (or 
whatever) by themselves; the only reason that both exist is to allow 
for a certain amount of stacking---in other words, the charset-hook 
hooks (for "correcting" or "canonicalizing" incoming charset names) 
can be distributed among many systems, while the iconv-hooks (for 
translating "correct" or "canonicalized" names into system-specific 
non-canonical names) should only be true for a single system (and 
probably one that has a broken iconv implementation).

Does that make sense?

~Kyle
- -- 
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
                                                         -- Oscar Wilde
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