Delphi ActiveX

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).

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var
email: TChilkatEmail;

begin
//  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 := TChilkatEmail.Create(Self);

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';

Memo1.Lines.Add('Charset = ' + email.Charset);

//  The generated MIME labels the body with the utf-8 charset.
Memo1.Lines.Add(email.GetMime());