On 17 May 2014, at 12:18 , Sean P. DeNigris <sean@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 itâs 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-BOMâd 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 itâs 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 exportingâ¦
Yeah, itâd be nice if they were at least as usable as Notepadâs -> 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 âæøåâ without an errorâ¦) Cheers, Henry