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List:       imap
Subject:    Re: international character set support in IMAP2bis
From:       Peter Svanberg <psv () nada ! kth ! se>
Date:       1992-10-20 3:05:58
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Quoting:  Mark Crispin <MRC@Panda.COM>
>
> However, I am considering one possibility to assist our foreign
> friends.  That is, to define that search strings are now in the
> proposed format used to express multinational characters in message
> headers.  I forget the exact RFC number

RFC 1342, Representation of Non-ASCII Text in Internet Message Headers

> I believe that if we define that the search strings use this format
> for specifying multinational characters, it will not introduce an
> incompatability.  The worst thing that would happen is that you
> would get a false negative when searching for texts in the message
> body if the IMAP server does not support that character set.

Will it be possible for the client to find out if a certain
character set is supported, or in any other way know when there is a
risk of false negatives?

> I would like to hear, particularly from my friends at NTT, if this
> would be helpful.  I think it is better than the current choices: no
> multinational search, or coercion the string into 7-bit ASCII and
> lots of false positives.

(I'm not from Japan, I'm from Sweden.) Yes, it would help us, if this
is what you meant:

1) The user types his search string as any other text, i.e. with
   eightbit characters.
2) The client encodes the user string into RFC1342 format and
   sends it to the server.
3) The server decodes it and compares it with (a decoded version
   of) the specified part of each letter.
---
Peter Svanberg, NADA, KTH		    Email: psv@nada.kth.se
Dept of Num Analysis and Comp. Science,
Royal Institute of Technology		    Phone: +46 8 790 71 46
S-100 44  Stockholm, SWEDEN		    Fax:   +46 8 790 09 30

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