On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 04:16:29PM -0400, Ed Blackman wrote:
In the display, I'll see "? ? ? ? * Track your shipment". If I pipe
the part being displayed to "od -a", I see runs of spaces where the
display shows alternating question marks and spaces:
0001160 sp c a n : nl sp sp sp sp sp sp sp sp * sp
0001200 T r a c k sp y o u r sp s h i p m
Another example:
"Suzie,
?
This email"
od -a:
0000000 S u z i e , nl sp nl T h i s sp
The messages I've seen affected have these MIME properties:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Need more information:
- what $LANG are you using?
- do you have iconv support enabled? (for conversion of iso-8859-1 to utf-8 if
using $LANG=*.utf-8)
- what is your $charset ?
- what is your $assumed_charset ?
That makes the latter example understandable, if not desirable: having
unquoted spaces at the end of the line is a violation of rule 3 of
RFC2045, section 6.7: "Octets with values of 9 and 32 MAY be
represented as US-ASCII TAB (HT) and SPACE characters, respectively,
but MUST NOT be so represented at the end of an encoded line. Any TAB
(HT) or SPACE characters on an encoded line MUST thus be followed on
that line by a printable character." But that rule concludes with
"Therefore, when decoding a Quoted-Printable body, any trailing white
space on a line must be deleted, as it will necessarily have been
added by intermediate transport agents." I'd greatly prefer that to
question marks.
This most likely has nothing to do with quoted-printable encoding. Mutt
doesn't replace characters while decoding (it happens when displaying).
I also don't see why leading runs of spaces, and runs of spaces in the
middle of printable characters, also get the "?".
