Set the Charset of an Email

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Demonstrates the Chilkat Email.Charset property, which represents the main charset of the email, such as utf-8, iso-8859-1, or Shift_JIS. Chilkat stores text internally as Unicode; this property mainly controls how the body text is converted to bytes and labeled when MIME is generated. This example sets the charset to utf-8 and prints the resulting MIME.

Background: Email is transmitted as bytes, but text can contain characters from many languages. A charset (character encoding) is the rule that maps characters to bytes. The email's MIME declares its charset in the Content-Type header (e.g. text/plain; charset="utf-8") so the receiving client can correctly turn the bytes back into readable text. utf-8 is the modern default because it can represent virtually every character; using the wrong charset is what produces "mojibake" (garbled characters).

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#include <C_CkEmail.h>

void ChilkatSample(void)
    {
    HCkEmail email;

    //  Demonstrates the Email.Charset property, which controls the main charset
    //  used when the email's MIME is generated (e.g. utf-8, iso-8859-1, Shift_JIS).

    email = CkEmail_Create();

    CkEmail_putSubject(email,"Charset example");
    CkEmail_putBody(email,"This email body will be labeled with the utf-8 charset.");

    //  Set the main charset.
    CkEmail_putCharset(email,"utf-8");

    printf("Charset = %s\n",CkEmail_charset(email));

    //  The generated MIME labels the body with the utf-8 charset.
    printf("%s\n",CkEmail_getMime(email));


    CkEmail_Dispose(email);

    }