PS: Re: "iconv: illegal input sequence" in VM

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 2:42 AM, Charles G Waldman <cgw at alum.mit.edu> wrote:

>  $ iconv -f  utf-8 -t iso-8859-1 ~/Mail/INBOX
>
> also results in the:
>
> "iconv: illegal input sequence at position xxxx"
>
> so there's really some invalid characters in the input, I'll have to
> try to understand how they are getting in there (again, this seems to
> happen with mail that people are sending from IPhones).  The actual
> bytes are:  e2 80 a2

Sure.  That's U+2022 (if I've done the math right, but it's close
enough:-), obviously out of the ISO 8859/1 range.  That is,
the problem is not that it's illegal UTF-8.  It's that it is illegal
to convert it to ISO 8859/1.

> (the double-quote before "test" is displaying correclty as a bullet in
> the terminal,but turns into a double-quote when I copy/paste to
> XEmacs).

This I don't yet understand, I'll try to look at it in the next
couple of days.