On 30 Mar 2008, at 22:24, Joe Strout wrote:
> 1. Stand, raise your right hand, and repeat after me: "there are
> hundreds of different ways to represent plain text as a series of
> bytes in a file."
>
> 2. Follow this with: "The copyright symbol is not in the ASCII
> character set."
>
> 3. Realize that, while ASCII characters tend to be the same in most
> encodings (with the notable exceptions of UTF-16 and UCS-4), non-
> ASCII characters such as the copyright symbol can vary dramatically
> from encoding to encoding.
>
> 4. Repeat until all this sinks in. :)
HaHa! OK, it's gone in. :)
Can I put my right hand down now?
>> Never used encodings before. :)
>
> No, you've always used encodings; you can't represent text on a
> computer without them. But I think you never understood that you
> were using them before.
>
> It's really quite simple: an app that writes text to a file has to
> decide how to represent that text as bytes. An app that reads text
> from a file has to decide how to interpret bytes as text. When those
> decisions are not the same, then the text that's read isn't the same
> as the text that was written. Nothing mysterious about that.
>
> If you want to increase the chances that well-written text editors
> will correctly guess the encoding of your file, you might consider
> starting it with a BOM -- which you can find described in the FAQ.
> But this is only a hint, which some apps will use and others will
> ignore. There is no universal solution to this problem, and never
> will be until everybody in the world agrees upon one encoding --
> which, in my opinion, will most likely be UTF-8.
Phew. Lots to read in that FAQ, and a lot to learn. I guess I just
took it for granted that "text" in a file was there automagically, and
universally. How wrong I was!
Thanks for all that info Joe.
All the best,
Mark.
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