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

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Message-ID: <20070107192029.GE21133@flint.arm.linux.org.uk>
Date:	Sun, 7 Jan 2007 19:20:29 +0000
From:	Russell King <rmk+lkml@....linux.org.uk>
To:	Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@...ux01.gwdg.de>
Cc:	David Woodhouse <dwmw2@...radead.org>,
	Tilman Schmidt <tilman@...p.cc>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: OT: character encodings (was: Linux 2.6.20-rc4)

On Sun, Jan 07, 2007 at 08:11:38PM +0100, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> 
> 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.

You're discarding a perfectly reasonable argument - file itself obviously
is not good at guessing the charset, but inspecting the resulting file
manually and identifying *both* ISO-8859 and UTF-8 character sequences
in there is pretty conclusive.  As I did indeed do prior to sending
that message.

In this case, 'file' was doing a remarkably accurate job.

-- 
Russell King
 Linux kernel    2.6 ARM Linux   - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
 maintainer of:
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