On Oct 12, 2006, at 22:06 UTC, R Charles Flickinger wrote: > I left text encoding alone in this project. My understanding is that > everything is UTF8 now, so I figured there would be no problems for > international users (I'm in Oregon, US).
Well, it's certainly not true that "everything" is UTF-8, particularly if your application has to send data to or accept data from any other applications (e.g., via files). > I receive feedback from a user in Finland, the app is choking on > Finnish. I went back to my code and tried forcing text encoding for > reads and writes to SystemDefault. Feedback from the user indicated > no improvement. Yowch, I should think not. UTF-8 is the correct thing to use. The question is, at what point is your app not getting UTF-8, or getting UTF-8 but thinking it's something else? > Thought to ask if there's any issues with text encoding, > workarounds? There are no issues (if by that you mean bugs) as far as I'm aware, and so nothing to work around. > This bites. I believe I should handle encodings at > all, given if a new file is created with my software, it is UTF8, so > the same file opened would also be UTF8. Yes, and so it is. You have a bug in your code, that's all. Bugs happen; don't beat yourself up about it. As for believing you shouldn't have to handle text encodings, well, I believe there shouldn't be strife and poverty in a world of plenty. :) Alas, the world isn't always as it should be. Text encodings are a historical reality; Unicode is an improvement but even that doesn't solve everything. (For example, there are two different ways to represent UTF-16, and even with UTF-8, there are two different ways to represent many accented Roman characters.) > Aren't all MacOS localizations using UTF8 by default? What does that mean?!? MacOS is an operating system that runs software. Software can use whatever encoding it chooses. In general, older apps tend to use the SystemDefault (WorldScript) encoding, and newer ones tend to use some flavor of Unicode, but that's by no means always true. The best apps are prepared to deal with any encoding, as well as is possible. > Any insights would be helpful here. This doesn't appear easily solved. Sure it is. Make a simple example. One of two things will happen: 1. You'll reproduce the problem, and since it's now in simple code, you'll either see the solution yourself or be able to describe it here so we can point it out; or 2. You won't reproduce the problem, in which case you can start looking at the difference between the simple case that works and your real code that doesn't. Also, you might want to search the archives for "Text Encoding FAQ" -- a little dated now, but still useful. HTH, - Joe -- Joe Strout -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Verified Express, LLC "Making the Internet a Better Place" http://www.verex.com/ _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives of this list here: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
