I am trying to understand how charset encoding works, and I get the distinct idea that I must be missing one small, vital piece of information.
Background: The problem arose as follows: Somebody changed the footer of the EuroPython Mailing list which is hosted at python.org to be: EuroPython 2014 \x96 Berlin, 21th\x9627th July Note the two \x96 s. The intent was almost certainly to have this string interpreted by the windows-1252 charset, where \x96 means a en dash. But the Europython mailing list is configured so that its messages come out Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Since \x96 is an unrecognised character in us-ascii, my mailer complained bitterly every time I read an EP message. Being a list admin, this bothered me, and I thought it would be my job to fix things. I thought I would change the charset to utf-8. After all, most European languages do not fit into "us-ascii" in any event. What if the conference had been held in my home town of Göteborg, for instance? But unless I have overlooked something, there is no way to make a charset change on a per-list basis through the mailman administrative interface. Instead you have to edit mm_cfg.py Even if I had root access on python.org, I wouldn't really want to inflict utf-8 on everybody else just because it makes things more convenient for the EuroPython mailing list. But needing to edit mm_cfg.py strikes me as a very odd design choice, odd enough that I figure either a) this isn't so and I have overlooked something, or b) it absolutely must be done this way for a reason I do not understand. Can somebody please explain this? Thank you very much, Laura Creighton ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org