Re: Vowel with Umlaut

[David Kastrup]

David Rogers <address@hidden> writes:

> In very general terms, it shouldn't be right to be "mangling"
> encodings by hand in *any* kind of project. It should be possible to
> find an encoding that does the job correctly the first time. That's
> what computers are for...

It is actually rather hard for an editor to preserve a byte stream when
it interprets the characters at the same time (search and replace can't
be hit and miss).  Some encodings (escape-based codings) can't do that
reasonably at all.  utf-8 is still quite hard (basically, you have to
convert anything not in the proper uniquely-encoded utf-8 set into
quoted bytes, and use something not in the proper utf-8 set for
representing quoted bytes).

So there are very few editors around that won't mangle files just by
loading and saving with a wrong idea of its encoding.  Emacs is one of
the few editors that manages quite well, while the developers of its
offspring XEmacs (which has different character handling, having been
forked while both only supported 8-bit encodings) so far call this an
impossible task.

-- 
David Kastrup