Classic ASP

Set the Charset of an Email

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).

Chilkat Classic ASP Downloads

Download Chilkat for Classic ASP

Classic ASP

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body>
<%
'  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).

set email = Server.CreateObject("Chilkat.Email")

email.Subject = "Charset example"
email.Body = "This email body will be labeled with the utf-8 charset."

'  Set the main charset.
email.Charset = "utf-8"

Response.Write "<pre>" & Server.HTMLEncode( "Charset = " & email.Charset) & "</pre>"

'  The generated MIME labels the body with the utf-8 charset.
Response.Write "<pre>" & Server.HTMLEncode( email.GetMime()) & "</pre>"

%>
</body>
</html>