Re: [VM] searching in mime encoded email

[Julian Bradfield]

[Resending from my "vm rocks" gmail account.  I hope Julian intended it to
go to the mailing list! -- Uday]

>Oh, perhaps you are saying they are "binary" as opposed to "ASCII".  I think
>that is a matter of view point.

No, it's not. You said "7-bit US ASCII", which means what it says: no
bytes with the high bit set, all to be interpreted according to ASCII.

>You can load a utf-8 folder into VM but, if there are any multibyte codes in
>there, they will get interpreted as separate characters.  You can't search

Indeed.

>You are probably thinking of the folder as being made up of bytes as opposed
>to characters.  That is a fine view point to take as long as you don't care
>to search.  But searching is what this thread is about!

The folder is made up of bytes. There's no getting round that.
Come to that, *any* file is made up of bytes. It doesn't get converted
to characters until it's read into an Emacs buffer with a given coding
system.
In VM's case, folder files are read into folder buffers with the
binary coding system, and so the folder buffer is also a sequence of
bytes (which are punned with characters 0 to 255).
It's inherently impossible to meaningfully treat a folder as a
sequence of characters - unless you already know that all the
characters in it are represented in the same coding system.