Re: Invalid UTF-8

Oren Ben-Kiki wrote:

>> Putting Unix into a non-Unicode ghetto is not an answer.
> 
> Right - dragging UNIX (kicking and screaming) into the Unicode world
> is :-)

Unfortunately the attitude that "some filenames will cause your program 
to throw an exception" means that it will NEVER happen. In the real 
world this is a show-stopper bug, ANY change that makes it not throw the 
error, even one that makes all foreign letters unreadable, is an 
acceptable fix, and this is what most programmers are going to do.

Therefore people will continue to treat 8-bit data as ISO-8859-1 for 
ever and ever, ignoring any indicators that it is UTF-8, as long as 
systems continue with this garbage about it being a "data error". It is 
not a data error any more than a misspelled word is!

For some reason you believe you are helping Unicode with this behavior, 
but I am trying to clearly explain that this is by far the biggest 
problem, much more so than completely ignorant programmers who think the 
data is ISO-8859-1. At least their programs copy a UTF-8 file unchanged 
and reliably. The person who is "kicking and screaming" is you, Unix has 
correctly separated data and presentation for years.

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