UTF-8 Output support for Pine
As of v4.63, the popular text-mode email program Pine cannot convert emails from their source character set to UTF-8. For those who receive emails from many parts of the world, it is very annoying to have to frequently change your terminal's character set to read an email in a different character set. (Strangely, pine can convert FROM UTF-8 to 8-bit terminal character sets, just not the other way around!)
There is at least one patch for Pine to accomplish UTF-8 output. However, it is rather large, depends (or appears to depend) on other patches, uses external Unicode libraries instead of the one already in pine, and is only available up to v4.61 of Pine.
So here is a really small patch that achieves a similar result.
Notes:
- There may be a few garbled characters across block translation boundaries from variable-length character sets. Probably some Asian character sets fall into this category. The errors however will be few (1 every 256 bytes at worst).
- The use of UTF-8 in Pine can lead to columns not lining up nicely. This is a general problem with Pine, and nothing to do with this patch. Since this patch might put more stuff into UTF-8, you might see more of it 'tho. (Of course, previously you just saw garbage there, so this is an improvement!)
Last updated 2/8/2005 by John Dalgliesh