The locale tells you which encoding your system uses _by default_. This is
not necessarily the same as the data you're currently working with.
> Even then, the user and app programmer should not have to care what
> encoding is being used.
For the user: you're perfectly right.
For the programmer: how would you write a browser or a mail client if you
completely ignored the charset information in the MIME header?
Egmont, I think we are talking at cross-purposes now.
I never suggested writing non-standards compliant code, or ignoring
MIME headers.
I just think that routines such as "regex" or "NFD" should be able to
assume that the strings they are passed match the encoding of the
current locale, or failing that ask the programmer to explicitly
qualify them as one of its supported encodings. I do not think the
strings should have built in machinery that does this work behind the
scenes implicitly.
So I agree with the GTK design, while I take objection the the "utf-8"
attribute on perl scalars.
If you thought I was suggesting something else, I was not,
Cheers
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
