Double HTML encoding of non-ASCII list description

Bug #266019 reported by Jouni-users
2
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
GNU Mailman
New
Medium
Unassigned

Bug Description

I created in Mailman 2.1.4 a list whose description
included some non-ASCII characters, e.g. "ä". Both on
the web page and in the List-ID header these were
HTML-encoded twice. That is, the HTML source of the
listinfo page replaces the character "ä" by ten
characters: ampersand, a, m, p, semicolon, hash, 2, 2,
8, semicolon, so that the user sees ampersand, hash, 2,
2, 8, semicolon. Also the List-ID header encodes "ä"
using these ten characters.

It seems that if I change the list's preferred language
to Finnish and re-enter the description, it gets
encoded correctly: the HTML source simply uses the
character directly, and the List-ID header uses RFC
2047 encoding. However, I don't like the Finnish
translation of the Mailman pages, so I want to use
English as the preferred language.

(There seems to be a work-around: I can set the
language to Finnish, then set the description, then
change the language back to English.)

It could be argued that if the language is set to
English (USA), Mailman has no way of knowing *a priori*
which encoding to use for eight-bit characters. In this
case, would it make sense to add a language called
"English (ISO Latin 1)", or "English (West-European)",
or something similar, for those of us who like the
English user interface but communicate in other
languages? Or possibly a separate configuration option
for the character set?

[http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=881369&group_id=103&atid=100103]

Revision history for this message
Barry Warsaw (barry) wrote :

For now, the workaround you describe is the only way to do
it. It might make sense to have a non-ASCII English
language option, although something more universal, like
utf-8 might make more sense than limiting it just to latin-1
(which makes most Europeans happy, but no one else :).

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