Fixing mojibake for email

Question

My application for macOS archives emails from email clients and IMAP accounts. One user got an email from a Windows user and archived the email from Mail. My app reads the data directly from the hard disk.

The user has an email with some a nice mojibake:

enter image description here

I can identify a few of the characters:

‰ → ä  ̧ → ü

But I can't figure out whhat the original encoding is. I made myself an encoding table for the characters "ö ä ü ß" and my data is not in that table:

enter image description here

Code:

dim theLeft as string = "ö ä ü ß"
for currentEncoding as integer = 0 to Encodings.Count - 1
 
 dim EncodingInternetName as String = Encodings.Item(currentEncoding).internetName
 
 if EncodingInternetName.IndexOf("iso") = -1 and EncodingInternetName.IndexOf("windows") = -1 then Continue
 dim newString as string = DefineEncoding(theLeft, Encodings.Item(currentEncoding)) '<---convert
 newString = ConvertEncoding(newString, Encodings.UTF8)
 Result.Add(EncodingInternetName + " " + newString)
 
next

Does anyone have an idea what encoding was used for the Mojibake?

• JosefZ: You face a double mojibake case (example in Python for its universal intelligibility): 'ö ä ü ß'.encode( 'cp1252').decode( 'mac-roman').encode( 'utf-8').decode( 'cp1252') returns ˆ ‰ ¸ fl and vice versa: 'ˆ ‰ ¸ fl'.encode( 'cp1252').decode( 'utf-8').encode( 'mac-roman').decode( 'cp1252') -> ö ä ü ß ...
• Beatrix Willius: Thanks, I was able to adapt that to my language.

Answer 1

dim theString as String = "ˆ ‰  ̧ fl"
theString = theString.ConvertEncoding(Encodings.WindowsANSI)
theString = theString.DefineEncoding(Encodings.UTF8)
theString = theString.ConvertEncoding(Encodings.MacRoman)
theString = theString.DefineEncoding(Encodings.WindowsANSI)
theString = theString.ConvertEncoding(Encodings.UTF8)