Mail::Sender character set/encoding

Rodster001 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Greetings!

I am using Mail::Sender and when I send an email, characters like ’ (hex 0x92), and ” (hex 0x94), etc are displaying as a □.

I should mention that the display problem actually happens in Outlook. If I "view source" on the email message, and open it in a text editor, the correct character is there (and has the same hex value). So, I am guessing this is a problem with not with the actual encoding, but a missing header so Outlook will display properly? I also forwarded the message to my Gmail account and in that case the characters are just being omitted. So, I really don't know, but I am stuck.

Anyway, if anyone knows a solution to this it would be much appreciated!

Code below. Note: I have tried both the SendEnc and SendLineEnc methods and encoding types both "quoted-printable" and "7bit". All with the same result.

my $sender = new Mail::Sender {
        smtp => "localhost",
        from => "me@myhost.com",
} or die "Can't create Mail::Sender object: $Mail::Sender::Error\n";

$sender->Open({
        to => "someone@somewhere.com",
        subject => "My Subject",
        ctype => 'text/html; charset=us-ascii',
        encoding => "quoted-printable",
}) or die "Can't open the message: $sender->{'error_msg'}\n";

$sender->SendEnc($message);

$sender->Close();
[download]

Thanks for your help!

Comment on Mail::Sender character set/encoding Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Mail::Sender character set/encoding by zwon (Abbot) on Mar 12, 2009 at 19:55 UTC
You specified charset=us-ascii and that means that any characters with codes more than 0x80 are illegal. Try to specify latin1 or whatever your actual charset is.	[reply]
Re^2: Mail::Sender character set/encoding by Rodster001 (Pilgrim) on Mar 12, 2009 at 20:26 UTC
Hey Thanks, that was it (latin1). Is there a universal way of determining a character set being used (i.e. in a given email, word document, text file, etc). Or do you have to poke around or just "know". Thanks again!	[reply]
Re^3: Mail::Sender character set/encoding by almut (Canon) on Mar 12, 2009 at 20:36 UTC
Is there a universal way of determining a character set being used You can try Encode::Guess, but generally it's better to "just know", as there's no easy failsafe way to determine encodings. In other words, the module can tell apart UTF-8 from ISO-8859-1, but is having a hard time figuring out if something is ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-15... (typically, you'd also need to specify potential candidates as hints, e.g. via `->set_suspects()`)	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Mail::Sender character set/encoding by Rodster001 (Pilgrim) on Mar 12, 2009 at 20:53 UTC
Re^5: Mail::Sender character set/encoding by almut (Canon) on Mar 12, 2009 at 21:28 UTC
Re^3: Mail::Sender character set/encoding by zwon (Abbot) on Mar 12, 2009 at 20:35 UTC
There are some modules that can detect text encoding, but generally you should just know.	[reply]
Re: Mail::Sender character set/encoding by talexb (Chancellor) on Mar 13, 2009 at 02:52 UTC
Just wanted to pass along a link to my recent adventures in that area, although it looks like you have a solution that works for you already. Alex / talexb / Toronto "Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds	[reply]
Re^2: Mail::Sender character set/encoding by bibliophile (Prior) on Mar 13, 2009 at 14:18 UTC
For extra credit (ok, it's really just some background information on character encodings), there is also How to handle encodings?	[reply]

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