Re: Interpretation of non-UTF8 strings

Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote:

> W liście z pon, 16-08-2004, godz. 15:32 +0100, Nick Ing-Simmons napisał:
> 
> 
>>Once we had 
>>
>>use encoding qw(locale);
>>
>>But it did not work well as not all locale implementations
>>give the API to return the encoding.
> 
> 
> Yes, authors of C APIs about encodings are to blame; not everyone
> supports nl_langinfo(CODESET), and iconv is not everywhere. Anyway,
> lib/open.pm tries to guess when it's not available, so the same can be
> applied to the encoding pragma.

Yes, the guessing algorithm is even documented (horrors!).

>>(And even en_GB can be in ASCII, 8859-1, 8859-15 (with euro), UTF-8, ...)
> 
> 
> If nl_langinfo(CODESET) is available, it will tell the correct encoding
> without having to know what en_GB means. I would understand if Perl's
> use encoding(locale) doesn't work on systems where it's hard to guess
> the locale encoding. Personally I don't care about Unicode on systems
> which don't support the necessary standard APIs, but I do care about
> ones that do.

And personally I don't care about people not caring about all systems :-)

--
Jarkko Hietaniemi <[email protected]> http://www.iki.fi/jhi/ "There is this special
biologist word we use for 'stable'.  It is 'dead'." -- Jack Cohen