My most annoying locale problem concerned reading Czech HTML emails in mh. Don't ask why, just accept that I got a lot of these and could not simply ignore them. The problem was that mh saw a text/html MIME type and, as it does for text, helpfully converted from the original encoding, usually CP1250 or iso8859-2, to the encoding specified in my locale environment variable, utf-8. Since the content was html, it then handed it to a ``browser'', in my case w3m, for pretty formatting. w3m read the encoding from the html header, thought its input was CP1250 or iso8859-2, and helpfully converted to utf-8. Both programs were behaving in a vaguely sensible way, but iconv was being run twice, and the result was gibberish. It took me a while to figure our what was happening and a while to figure out a way to make it stop. I don't know what the general answer to problems like this is. Forcing everyone to use English is not an option. Forcing everyone to use utf-8 would be better, but is not going to happen either.
John -- John Stalker School of Mathematics Trinity College Dublin tel +353 1 896 1983 fax +353 1 896 2282
