On 17 May 2014, at 12:18 , Sean P. DeNigris <s...@clipperadams.com> wrote:
> > I wonder... can all this be handled automatically? > When I open either file > in OS X, it seems to just "do the right thing». Sorta, though not 100% reliably. The problem is, if the automatic handling decides wrong, you end up with garbage content, rather than a nice, clean error. (Say, a file gets interpreted as ISO-8859-1 when it’s really ISO-8859-15) You *could* automatically detect BOM-marked files with no errors, but the frequency of such files compared to that of single-byte encoded files, or non-BOM’d UTF is rather low, so the payoff is rather small for the extra effort it takes trying to detect encoding for every stream opened. Which is why the standard choice fell on something that will signal an error if it’s the wrong choice, which means having to make an explicit decision which is the correct one on a case-by-case basis, as you experienced. > I also wonder why gmail > doesn't clearly display the encoding when you're exporting… Yeah, it’d be nice if they were at least as usable as Notepad’s -> Save as… dialogue, huh? :) (Though, for some reason this seems hard to do in a usable yet flawless manner, that one allows you to select ASCII as encoding, and still save ‘æøå’ without an error…) Cheers, Henry
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