Decode email subjects into unicode

[Gertjan Klein]

Laszlo Nagy wrote:

>However, there are malformed emails and I have to put them into the 
>database. What should I do with this:
[...]
>There is no encoding given in the subject but it contains 0x92. When I 
>try to insert this into the database, I get:

This is indeed malformed email. The content type in the header specifies
iso-8859-1, but this looks like Windows code page 1252, where character
\x92 is a single right quote character (unicode \x2019).

As the majority of the mail clients out there are Windows-based, and as
far as I can tell many of them get the encoding wrong, I'd simply try to
decode as CP1252 on error, especially if the content-type claims
iso-8859-1. Many Windows mail clients consider iso-8859-1 equivalent to
1252 (it's not; the former doesn't use code points in the range \x8n and
\x9n, the latter does.)

Regards,
Gertjan.

-- 
Gertjan Klein <gklein at xs4all.nl>