char sets and the euro symbol question

[John]

Hi,

I need to send email which contain a Euro symbol (?). The emails will be
created on the fly by a web server using PHP. Looking at the various
standare char sets, iso-8859-x etc, there is no such symbol, so I assumed I
needed to use the unicode / UFT-8 set.

However, I just sent myself and email from Yahoo to my Outlook and it had
the following header:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

?

How can this the Euro symbol be transported and displayed using us-ascii
when this char set does not contain the symbol? What is going on here?

I would be grateful for any help,

thanks,
Kevin

[John]

Thanks Göran .

The site I was looking only had iso-8859 charts up to 7 or 9 so I was not
aware of that char set.

The site you mentioned warns against using the euro symbol in emails, is
this a real problem or is the author being over cautious?

Thanks,
Kevin

> The Euro symbol is in iso-8859-15 (ISO Latin 9) code position 164 (the
> same code position as the currency symbol, circle with four rays, have
> in iso-8859-1).
>
> More information can be found in <
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/euro.html >.
>
> Note that iso-8859-15 is of no help to you if the receiver does not have
> iso-8859-15 fonts. Perhaps the official abbreviation EUR can be used
instead?
>
> --
> Göran Larsson hoh AT approve DOT se

[those who know me have no need of my name]

<wvy38.103$425.2...@newsr2.u-net.net> divulged:

>I need to send email which contain a Euro symbol (?). The emails will be
>created on the fly by a web server using PHP. Looking at the various
>standare char sets, iso-8859-x etc, there is no such symbol,

you want iso-8859-15.

>so I assumed I needed to use the unicode / UFT-8 set.

that would work too. perhaps better since it will always work, no matter
what character you need to send. the fly in the ointment is that the
recipient might not be able to handle that encoding.

>How can this the Euro symbol be transported and displayed using us-ascii
>when this char set does not contain the symbol? What is going on here?

it cannot be properly transported. what is happening is that yahoo isn't
interpreting the byte, it's being sent to your system `as-is' and your
system is interpreting it as being within it's locale.

--
okay, have a sig then

[tells]

John <johnmsim...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> The site you mentioned warns against using the euro symbol in emails, is
> this a real problem or is the author being over cautious?

It's a real problem, because it isn't a sure thing that the one getting
the e-mail has either iso-8859-15 nor UTF8 available in the mailreader;
and if it's available, it might not be an automatic switch to it.

The result is that the euro symbol might look like some other symbol,
maybe even one looking like another currency...

/t

[Villy Kruse]

Like this, perhaps? ¤

Villy