Ruby Forum Ruby on Rails > Send e-mail with charset iso-8859-1

I have a rails application that sends e-mails. The e-mails currently
use the utf-8 charset, but I have to change this to iso-8859-1 since
it doesn't play well with Outlook. (Norwegian characters such as ÆØÅ 
are not displayed correctly, because Outlook doesn't recognize the
utf-8 charset)

1. I've set the default charset i the environment, but this does not
work. (ActionMailer::Base.default_charset = "iso-8859-1")
2. I've tried to set the @charset variable, but this does not work
either.
    @subject = '..'
    @recipients = '...'
    ...
    @charset = 'iso-8859-1'

It's seem that rails simply ignores every attempt to change the
charset.
What to do??

Kind regards,
Eivind Løland-Andersen

Umulium wrote:
> I have a rails application that sends e-mails. The e-mails currently
> use the utf-8 charset, but I have to change this to iso-8859-1 since
> it doesn't play well with Outlook. (Norwegian characters such as ��� 
> are not displayed correctly, because Outlook doesn't recognize the
> utf-8 charset)
> ...
> It's seem that rails simply ignores every attempt to change the
> charset.

we spent hours over here and were trying to get around this issue as 
well.
while reading the actionmailer code we learned that indeed there is no 
conversion as one would like it to be when changing the charsets.

in fact the documentation is a little bit misleading.

actionmailer does no charset conversion by itself. changing the default 
charset does only change the declaration of the content but not the 
content itself.
so the solution is - you have to do conversions by hand.

something like
  def contact_message(message)
    from            message[:email].to_iso
    subject         message[:subject].to_iso
    body            message[:body].to_iso
  end
might work, if your output should be some kind of iso.

cheers,
mrIllo

and first for this above to work you have to have an initializer:

class String
  def to_iso
    Iconv.conv('ISO-8859-1', 'utf-8', self)
  end
end

class NilClass
  def to_iso
    Iconv.conv('ISO-8859-1', 'utf-8', '')
  end
end


(code provided by railway team)