Re: 日本語のSubject line

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Craig" == Craig Oda <craig@example.com> writes:

    Craig> I'm interested in allowing Japanese subject lines on this
    Craig> and other mailing lists.  This is especially helpful for
    Craig> the digest which compiles the table of contents from the
    Craig> subject lines of the individual posts.  Has anyone seen
    Craig> this function in a mailing list before?

The ISSHO-Kikaku lists allow this.  There is an Issho list for
primarily English discussion, and an Issho-J list for primarily
Japanese discussion.  Both permit Japanese subjects, although they are 
rather rare on Issho, and English/Romaji predominates on Issho-J
(because many of the correspondents there are gaijin or expatriate
Japanese who use English-language OSes by preference or because they
can't get Japanese OSes (or support for them)).

Issho-J is pretty high traffic; you would probably want to subscribe
to the digest if you just want to check out the headers.  The guy who
runs Issho is Tony Laszlo, <laszlo@example.com>.  A nice guy, he'll be
glad to help.  He's not a wizard, though (he's a coordinator-type; he
likes computers, but he's no bit-flicker), so he may or may not know
the answers to your questions.  It's a Majordomo list:
majordomo@example.com, use "subscribe issho-j-digest".

A sample Nihongo header follows:

>From: =?ISO-2022-JP?B?GyRCQG4wZhsoSg==?= <mkawai@example.com>
>Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 19:24:37 -0000
>Subject: [ISSHO-J: 98] Why ISSHO for me

and one with the subject in Japanese:

>From: Kiyoshi Adachi <BXH05371@example.com>
>Date: Sat, 21 Sep 1996 10:15:00 +0900
>Subject: [ISSHO-J: 95] =?ISO-2022-JP?B?GyRCNmU9IyRORT41b0BoGyhC?=

Note the MIME/quoted-printable encoding.  This is required for
compliance to the relevant RFCs.  All mail transfer agents that I know
of mung the headers.  Usually not the Subject header, of course, but
they do add "received" and "message-id" and "x-authentication" and so
on.  Many of them do this with non-8-bit clean code (often located in
old versions of system libraries; it's not necessarily the MTA's
fault), so in that case even the "untouched" headers can get trashed.
I think it's RFC822 (maybe RFC821) that specifies that the header
section must be in 7-bit ASCII.  Check out RFC-MIME (I think it's
1463?) for that.

    Craig> I'm using sendmail and nkf for the text and majordomo 1.93

I've had problems with nkf on some texts; Ken Lunde's jconv seemed to
work better with them.  However, I also had an old version of libc at
that time, and nkf regularly SIGSEGV'd, too.  nkf 1.5's source was a
model of Obfuscated C.  I don't think nkf 1.6 is any better.  Anyway,
jconv.c is now in

file://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/public-ftp/Linux-util/jconv.c

(that's /pub/Linux-util/jconv.c if you're using FTP), if you think it
might be useful.  nkf is probably fine, though.

    Craig> (I think) with Japanese Perl 5.

Still think it's worth it?  I don't know whether Issho does the
MIME-encoding or if everybody is just using a compliant mailer....
You could also ignore MIME compliance issues, at least for TLUG; Linux
is 8-bit clean ;-)  If you're running lists that are read by people
with Maxen or Windowze systems, you probably ought to go to MIME
compliance since they use Shit-JIS (mostly they will translate EUC for
you, but EUC is not always distinguishable from Shit-JIS, and the
relevant RFC (RFC-MIME) specifies ISO-2022, and thus JIS, for Internet
mail.

Good luck!
Steve

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences  http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com
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