SQL Server

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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--
CREATE PROCEDURE ChilkatSample
AS
BEGIN
    DECLARE @hr int
    DECLARE @sTmp0 nvarchar(4000)
    --  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).

    DECLARE @email int
    EXEC @hr = sp_OACreate 'Chilkat.Email', @email OUT
    IF @hr <> 0
    BEGIN
        PRINT 'Failed to create ActiveX component'
        RETURN
    END

    EXEC sp_OASetProperty @email, 'Subject', 'Charset example'
    EXEC sp_OASetProperty @email, 'Body', 'This email body will be labeled with the utf-8 charset.'

    --  Set the main charset.
    EXEC sp_OASetProperty @email, 'Charset', 'utf-8'


    EXEC sp_OAGetProperty @email, 'Charset', @sTmp0 OUT
    PRINT 'Charset = ' + @sTmp0

    --  The generated MIME labels the body with the utf-8 charset.
    EXEC sp_OAMethod @email, 'GetMime', @sTmp0 OUT
    PRINT @sTmp0

    EXEC @hr = sp_OADestroy @email


END
GO