Re: How to convert <binaryGlowMixedWithASCII> to pure ASCII

On 2025-05-12, Kenny McCormack wrote:

In article <slrn1023i84.2s2es.cmartin+usenetYYMMDD@nyx2.nyx.net>,
Chuck Martin  <cmartin+usenetYYMMDD@nyx.net> wrote:
...

Try piping it into the following command:
>
perl -CS -MEncode -ne 'print decode("MIME-Header", $_)'

>
Bingo!  Thanks very much.
>
That worked well on the other example I gave in the OP too (which was
actually more the focus of my query).
>
I still get the binary glop in place of the single quotes (The text
contains the word "They're", rendered as "They<binaryglop>re").  Note that
in the input string, <binaryglop> is (the literal string): =E2=80=99
which gets converted by your Perl program into the 3
characters with octal codes (as displayed by "od -bc"): 342 200 231
>
I can deal with this later problem myself via brute force with AWK, but it
would be nice if I didn't have to - i.e., if there were a complete solution
(i.e., one that does also the other half of the job).

My guess is that this isn't an apostrophe, but a "right single quotation
mark", which is sadly a common sight in such a context, and Emacs tells
me that this (UCS codepoint 0x2019) is represented as E2 80 99 in UTF-8.

Are there good ways to convert such chars to something more reasonable?
The only thing that occurs to me right now is passing it through iconv
to a more limited charset using transliteration (e.g. "iconv -f utf8 -t
iso8859-1//TRANSLIT -c") and then back to the desired encoding and
charset.

(But I suppose if this is already involving perl, then perhaps such a
modification can be done through perl too.)

--
Nuno Silva