Re: Question about watch-file

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Raphael Geissert <atomo64+debian@gmail.com> writes:

> Yeah, that's another known issue. DEHS currently treats all its
> input data as ISO-8859-1 and converts it into UTF-8 without first
> checking if the input is already UTF-8.

Since there's no way to deduce the encoding of a byte stream for
certain, and the heuristics are both complicated and prone to false
positives, it would be better not to "check" the encoding of a text
file in the absence of an explicit declaration of its encoding.

Better would be to assume the input is UTF-8, and encourage all
authors of such files to encode them using Debian's de facto (and, in
increasingly many areas, de jure) standard of UTF-8.

> Will try to fix it next time I dig on DEHS' code.

Appreciated.

-- 
 \        “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, |
  `\       I'll use regular expressions'. Now they have two problems.” |
_o__)                           —Jamie Zawinski, in alt.religion.emacs |
Ben Finney