[Pan-users] Re: Problem decoding files with special/foreign characters

[Duncan]

Mac posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below,  on Thu,
09 Dec 2004 12:11:52 +0100:

> I've been using pan for quite a while and I always had the problem that
> pan fails to decode binaries with special characters like
> äöüíeèéô... The error message in the log is: "(Null) -
> g_mime_iconv_strndup: Illegal byte sequence"
> 
> Is this a problem of my configuration or a pan problem? And is there a
> solution to this problem? I'm using pan 14.2.91 on OSX (X11).

Well, traditionally, "internet message" (mail and news, mainly) format was
a subset of the 7-bit ANSI character set.  There were definite technical
reasons (interoperation amongst a number of diverse platforms being the
big one, with the allowed characters basically being the subset of all
characters that the platforms had in common) for the requirement,
particularly for mail.  News evolved in a slightly different direction,
however, and is now almost 8-bit clean (with some required workarounds,
basically as yEnc provides, for instance).

That's the origin of the problem.  G_MIME was designed for MIME, which is
mail oriented, and still has the legacy of those restrictions.  The bug
has been a known issue with PAN for I'd guess two years, now, but it
didn't happen to get fixed before the big development freeze that lasted
about a year (Charles was to busy with real life -- and jobs that actually
earn money to pay the rent).  Now that Charles is active on PAN again,
he's mentioned he plans a fairly quick bugfix release, followed by some
intensive work integrating the SQLite database library backend, that
others had been working on while he took his "vacation".  This is one of
the bugs affecting the most people, so hopefully, it'll be fixed with the
bugfix release.  If not, it could be some time, as integrating the db
backend is going to be a pretty big job, and will mean major changes to
PAN on its own.

In any case, it's definitely a known PAN bug, so you don't have to worry
about it being your config.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
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