From: Martin Duerst <duerst@...>
Date: 2007-10-30T14:39:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Implementation of "guessUTF" method - final questions

At 21:11 07/10/29, Nikolai Weibull wrote:
>On 10/29/07, Martin Duerst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote:
>> At 17:50 07/10/29, Nikolai Weibull wrote:

>> In theory, yes. However, for many encoding (e.g. the ISO-8859-X
>> series), the answer would always be 'yes'. That would make these
>> methods easy to implement, but the result would be rather useless.
>
>Not necessarily.  There are still ranges in 0..255 that the ISO-8859-X
>don't use, for example,
>ISO-8859-1 = UNION(7..10, 12..13, 27, 32..126, 133, 164..255).

That's just one way to look at ISO-8859-1. In many ways, it's not
too bad, but in many ways, it's extremely arbitrary. I wouldn't want
to bake this into Ruby.

>Also,
>the question of what is useful here is rather much up to the user.
>The returned list of Encodings that believe themselves capable of
>decoding the input would have to be discriminated somehow.  In an
>interface, for example, the application could present the user with
>the list of Encodings and let them choose one.

Well, yes, but if possible, we'd like to avoid this. Users shouldn't
have to care about character encodings.

Regards,    Martin.


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp