[Python-Dev] PEP 263 considered faulty (for some Japanese)
Martin v. Loewis
martin@v.loewis.de
13 Mar 2002 18:05:04 +0100
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> writes:
> I would think that UTF-8 can be quite reliably detected without the
> "BOM".
There is a difference between auto-detection and declaration. Sure,
you can auto-detect UTF-8; you might have to read the entire text for
that, though. This is quite different from a declaration: The text
either is declared as UTF-8, or it isn't.
> Microsoft software for Japanese apparently ignores Content-Type
> headers and the like in favor of autodetection (probably because the
> same MS software regularly relies on users to set things like
> charset parameters in MIME Content-Type).
Auto-detection is useful for displaying content to users. It is evil
for a programming language.
Regards,
Martin