Re: utf-16le vs utf-16-le

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > Which 9 are needed by UTF-8?  I only see 4: the auto-detecting one,
 > then one each for -unix. -dos, and -mac.  What am I missing?

BOM-{prohibited,auto,required}.  Just because you don't see a need for
them doesn't mean that there are cases where somebody might want to
force or prohibit BOMs in UTF-8 for compatibility with other apps.

 > Don't forget that en/decoding is used on strings as well, not only on
 > buffers.  Buffer-local variables won't cut it, I think.

Strings don't have encoding signatures or newline variants; those
octet sequences if present in a string are merely binary octet
sequences.  They only have special semantics in external
representations.  Where's the problem?