Re: GIT character codecs

From: Matthias Urlichs <smurf@smurf.noris.de>
Date: Nov 14, 2005, 07:42 UTC
Message-ID: <20051114074246.GP27727@kiste.smurf.noris.de>
In-Reply-To: <20051114063126.27817.qmail@web26306.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>

Hi,

Marco Costalba:

Show 6 quoted lines

> >Or, if you want to be super-flexible, just try to decode as UTF-8.
> >Success? fine -- otherwise use whatever your application's default is
> >set to, or your local encoding (which may of course also be UTF-8), or
> >fall back to 8859-15.
> 
> How it is possible to test for success?

UTF-8 decoding does NOT always succeed.

In fact, there is no other 8-bit encoding which decodes as valid UTF-8, given real-world text.

> The codec could see everything decodable, but It's only from the
> context, i.e. the user who reads, that it is possible to realize it's
> the wrong codec.  
>

True in general, but not with UTF-8 (or ASCII, for that matter ;-).

-- 
Matthias Urlichs   |   {M:U} IT Design @ m-u-it.de   |  smurf@smurf.noris.de
Disclaimer: The quote was selected randomly. Really. | http://smurf.noris.de
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