Re: OT: character encodings (was: Linux 2.6.20-rc4)

[Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@linux01.gwdg.de>]

On Jan 7 2007 17:06, Russell King wrote:
>On Mon, Jan 08, 2007 at 12:29:05AM +0800, David Woodhouse wrote:
>
>$ git log | head -n 1000 | tail -n 200 > o
>$ file -i o
>o: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>$ git log | head -n 1000 | tail -n 300 > o
>$ file -i o
>o: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>$ git log | head -n 1000 | tail -n 400 > o
>$ file -i o
>o: text/plain; charset=utf-8

I am inclined to say that "file" does not count, because it tries to guess an
ambiguous mapping from bytes to character set. Even more, file should be
_unable at all_ to distinguish an iso-8859-1 from an iso-8859-2 (or worse: 15)
file. This program is soo... forget it, it's not an argument. It works well for
headerful files, but text files don't really contain one. The next best thing
would be html, with a proper <meta http-equiv=Content> tag.


	-`J'
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