addex, mutt, and ascii
After my last set of poking at making Addex do 7-bitization of funny
characters, I did some more poking around and learned some things that helped
me get everything working just fine. I’ve made a new release of Addex and the
Apple address book plugin, so now anyone can have his friend José show
up with an alias of jose by updating his Addex config to include:
[App::Addex::Output::Mutt]
unidecode = 1
This replaced my lousy unicode-to-ascii conversion with Sean M. Burke’s presumably awesome Text::Unidecode. It catches every case I caught, and probably a lot more that I haven’t had to worry about yet. I saw the tests spitting bizarre southeast Asian characters to the screen and was glad I never had to think about it.
I also found out that the simple rule with Mac::Glue is that you either get
back Unicode or MacRoman. From looking at the source, I think the Unicode will
always be in a string that is_utf8, so I just decode any non-is_utf8 string
from MacRoman.
Having done that, without using Text::Unidecode, mutt was still confused. Then I realized that it was all my fault: I was not setting the write filehandle to utf8 mode, so the bytes were getting mangled. Once I did that, the file made a lot more sense. Of course, it still meant that I would have to type in funny characters if they were in the “before I hit tab to tab complete” part of a name, so I still wanted to downgrade to the English alphabet. Text::Unidecode quietly replaced my code, and then I added a config option and it’s done. Anyone using Addex with contacts who have silly foreign names should update. My mutt is a lot nicer to look at now.