Pascal (Lazarus/Delphi)

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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Pascal (Lazarus/Delphi)

program ChilkatDemo;

// Demonstrates using the Chilkat Pascal wrapper via the C bridge DLL.
// Builds as a console application under Lazarus (FPC) or Delphi.

{$IFDEF FPC}
  {$MODE DELPHI}
{$ENDIF}
{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}

uses
  {$IFDEF UNIX}
  cthreads,
  {$ENDIF}
  SysUtils,
  CkDllLoader,
  Chilkat.Email;

// ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

procedure RunDemo;
var
  email: TEmail;

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 := TEmail.Create;

  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';

  WriteLn('Charset = ' + email.Charset);

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


  email.Free;

end;

// ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

begin

  try
    RunDemo;
  except
    on E: Exception do
      WriteLn('Unhandled exception: ', E.ClassName, ': ', E.Message);
  end;

  WriteLn;
  {$IFDEF MSWINDOWS}
  WriteLn('Press Enter to exit...');
  ReadLn;
  {$ENDIF}
end.