Forum OpenACS Development: Re: About Charsets

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5: Re: About Charsets (response to 4)
Posted by Jeff Davis on
> Why not having all the catalog files in UTF-8 as (for example) the GNOME project does (with the po files)?

The problem is that if people edit the file, unless they have their local editor local editor set to utf-8 it will mess up the file if they insert any high bit characters. At a guess I would say the majority of developers are running with their charset in their editor as iso-8859-1 or iso-8859-15.

The reason this came up is because it turns out that tcl has (or had maybe?) a problem with iso-8859-6 (arabic) where the numbers are mapped to the unicode arabic numeric code points and so iso-8859-6 -> utf-8 -> iso-8859-6 was not idempotent. The simple solution was to store arabic things in utf-8 which is how we ended up where we are.

Maybe it would be better to store everything in utf-8 but if we do, I expect we will end up with some messed up catalog files at some point (although this is true no matter what encoding we chose).

Eduardo, when you edit a file, is your editor in utf-8 or iso-8859-1?