E-Mail charset is not set back to original during body.decode

[januszm]

I had a problem today because in my application ISO-8859-2 characters (diacritics) where not shown in mail body.
I've found out that I have to manually guess original mail charset and use it in {{{ force_encoding }}} method, to be able to save body content in MySQL database.

I think that mail gem should check charset before doing DECODE so that after .decode we can see original diacritics.

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10787791/ruby-rails-email-base64-gets-split-at-diacritics-and-content-lost-in-mysql/10790062#10790062

if message.multipart?
    charset = message.text_part.content_type_parameters[:charset]
    @message_body = message.text_part.body.to_s.force_encoding(charset).encode("UTF-8")
else
    charset = message.content_type_parameters[:charset]
    @message_body = message.body.decoded.force_encoding(charset).encode("UTF-8")
end

and what I wanted to have is:

@message_body = message.multipart? ? message.text_part.body.to_s : message.body.decoded

[webdevotion]

This works for me on dozens of e-mails. Reading e-mails from Gmail using IMAP on Ruby 1.9.3.
The code makes the body human readable for me without technical headers.
Thanks!

[jeremy]

Rather than using message.body.decoded or message.decode_body (which just calls body.decoded), call message.decoded. That checks whether it's a text message [1] and calls message.decode_body_as_text, which decodes the transfer-encoding and sets the Ruby string encoding according to the message's charset [2].

[1] https://github.com/mikel/mail/blob/master/lib/mail/message.rb#L1786
[2] https://github.com/mikel/mail/blob/master/lib/mail/message.rb#L2047-L2050

[webdevotion]

a simple test from a project I'm working on now:

email = Email.find_by_message_id(mail.message_id)
body = mail.decoded

results in :

Can not decode an entire message, try calling #decoded on the various fields and body or parts if it is a multipart message.

doing it as proposed by @januszm works as expected for me:

if mail.multipart?
  charset = mail.text_part.content_type_parameters[:charset]
  body = mail.text_part.body.to_s.force_encoding(charset).encode("UTF-8")
else
  charset = mail.content_type_parameters[:charset]
  body = mail.body.decoded.force_encoding(charset).encode("UTF-8")
end

[jeremy]

@webdevotion Call it on the text part: message.text_part.decoded

[webdevotion]

Thank you @jeremy. It's working now.
Processing loads of emails can be quite daunting at first.
Your help is much appreciated.

[jeremy]

@webdevotion—Great!