RE: texteditors that can process and save in different encodings

Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:

>> Which metadata is that? I was sure we were talking about editors for
>> plain-text files, which don't have any sort of metadata declaring the
>> character encoding or anything else.
>
> There's always some metadata : either it comes from the filesystem
> itself (filenaming conventions or explicit storage of this metadata,
> including HTTP that is a filesystem supporting them, or MIME for
> emails), or it comes from information provided by the user in that
> editor, to instrut it about how to decode it, or it is implicit in the
> editor itself which offers no choice for it in its GUI or command
> line.

Suppose I have a file called 'karenina.txt' on my flash drive. Let's
assume we can trust from the .txt extension that it really is a text
file of some sort (that is metadata). Now, what encoding is this file
in? See Stephan's comment again about the editor doing charset
detection.

> As soon as a user needs to specify the filetype or file encoding
> somewhere that the filesystem does not provide itself as separately
> stored metadata, the user provides additional metadata. This is true
> when he also chooses a specific editor that handles a specific syntax
> or encoding (the metadata provided by the user consists in this choice
> of tool, even if it was inappropriate from a wrong guess or
> assumption).

Right, but you talked about "saving them as ASCII (i.e. saving this
charset information in the metadata)". This is explicit metadata, not
the implicit type that you're talking about now.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA
http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell ­