Java

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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Java

import com.chilkatsoft.*;

public class ChilkatExample {

  static {
    try {
        System.loadLibrary("chilkat");
    } catch (UnsatisfiedLinkError e) {
      System.err.println("Native code library failed to load.\n" + e);
      System.exit(1);
    }
  }

  public static void main(String argv[])
  {
    //  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).

    CkEmail email = new CkEmail();

    email.put_Subject("Charset example");
    email.put_Body("This email body will be labeled with the utf-8 charset.");

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

    System.out.println("Charset = " + email.charset());

    //  The generated MIME labels the body with the utf-8 charset.
    System.out.println(email.getMime());
  }
}