Re: [RFC] send-email: UTF-8 encoding in subject line
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> Le 20 févr. 2026 à 09:51, Shreyansh Paliwal <shreyanshpaliwalcmsmn@gmail.com> a écrit :
>
> Hi,
>
> While using git send-email I ran into some confusion around the prompt that
> appears when any 8-bit (non-ASCII) content is detected.
>
> When prompted with,
>
> Which 8bit encoding should I declare [UTF-8]? y
> Are you sure you want to use <y> [y/N]? y
Yeah, that was a bit confusing for me until I got used to it. Maybe saying “[default: UTF-8]” would be a small and definite improvement?
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> I initially assumed this was a yes/no style confirmation and answered "y",
> and ignored the 'which' part (this was due to my oversight). This resulted
> in the charset being set to "y", which later produced a subject line like,
>
> =?y?q?...?=
>
> Mail clients like Gmail still displayed the message correctly, but the
> mailing list archive showed the raw encoded form[1].
>
> Afterwards, I realized the prompt expects a charset name (e.g., "UTF-8")
> rather than a yes/no answer, and pressing enter would have selected the
> default (which is UTF-8).
>
> I had also encountered this earlier when the non-ASCII character was in the
> message body rather than the subject, in that case the result appeared to
> work fine even with the mistaken input, which made the issue less obvious
> to me at first.
>
> This made me wonder whether the current UX around the prompts or input
> validation could be improved in any way to reduce the chance of accidental
> input being interpreted as a charset name.
>
> Best,
> Shreyansh
>
> [1]- https://lore.kernel.org/git/20260219181154.66814-1-shreyanshpaliwalcmsmn@gmail.com/
Thanks for thinking on this; better that I never needed to get used to the oddity ;)
Ben Knoble <ben.knoble@gmail.com>