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Re: Question about UTF-8

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Question about UTF-8
• From: Gustaf Liljegren <gustaf.liljegren@x...>
• Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 19:02:52 +0200
• In-reply-to: <3F4E0F34.70403@t...>
• References: <3.0.6.32.20030828161218.00e17738@m...><3.0.6.32.20030828161218.00e17738@m...>

At 07:18 2003-08-28 -0700, Tim Bray wrote:

>> Is there a safe way for a non-XML-aware text editor to find out that this
>> file is using UTF-8?

>It is not ambiguous at all what the encoding must be; there's no 
>encoding declaration, so it must be UTF-8.

In an XML-aware editor, yes. But the question is about general
('non-XML-aware') text editors. A general editor has no idea of the
encoding detection mechanism in XML, so I wonder how it knows that the
octets C3 A4 should be written 'ä' and not 'ä' (or something else).

Many users who see 'ä' when they open a UTF-8 encoded XML document in a
text editor, prefer to use ISO 8859-1 to avoid this effect.

Maybe the answer is to stay in ISO 8859-1 (or whatever default encoding the
editor has), but I was hoping it was possible to recommend using UTF-8 all
the time (for European scripts).

Gustaf

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• References:
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    • From: Gustaf Liljegren <gustaf.liljegren@x...>
  • Re: Question about UTF-8
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>

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