Setting the MIME Text Charset (such as utf-8, iso-8859-1, etc.)

Demonstrates how setting the Charset property controls the character encoding used for the text body in a MIME message.

Download Chilkat MIME ActiveX

Dim mime As New ChilkatMime

Dim success As Long
success = mime.UnlockComponent("Anything for 30-day trial.")
If (success = 0) Then
    Text1.Text = Text1.Text & mime.LastErrorText & vbCrLf
    Exit Sub
End If

'  Set the MIME body using some 8bit non-us-ascii characters:
mime.SetBody "á, é, í, ó, ú"

'  Set the Content-Type
mime.ContentType = "text/plain"

'  Set the Content-Transfer-Encoding to "quoted-printable"
'  so it's easy to see the bytes used to encode each character
'  (i.e. it will be easy to see that utf-8 uses 2-bytes for
'  non-us-ascii characters such as "á", whereas a character
'  encoding such as iso-8859-1 will use one byte per character.
mime.Encoding = "quoted-printable"

'  Set the Charset to utf-8
mime.Charset = "utf-8"

'  Examine the MIME:
Text1.Text = Text1.Text & mime.GetMime() & vbCrLf

'  The MIME should look like this:
'  
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

=C3=A1, =C3=A9, =C3=AD, =C3=B3, =C3=BA

'  Now change the Charset to "iso-8859-1"
mime.Charset = "iso-8859-1"

'  Get the MIME again...
Text1.Text = Text1.Text & mime.GetMime() & vbCrLf

'  Now the MIME should look like this:
'  
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

=E1, =E9, =ED, =F3, =FA