From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2007-11-09T16:46:18+09:00
Subject: Re: primary encoding and source encoding

Hi,

In message "Re: primary encoding and source encoding"
    on Fri, 9 Nov 2007 05:42:47 +0900, David Flanagan <david@davidflanagan.com> writes:
|
|I've got a couple of questions about the handling of primary encoding. 
|First, here is my understanding of how things currently work in the 1.9 
|sources:
|
|1) The default primary encoding is ASCII.

ASCII-8BIT, yes.

|2) -K, -E, and --encoding options set primary encoding

Yes.

|3) The primary encoding is associated with the string or file that
|the parser is going to parse, and thus the primary encoding is used as 
|the default source encoding for the script.

The role for the primary encoding is the default for file I/O, nothing
more.  It does (should) not affect the source encoding at all.

|4) If a script contains a coding comment or BOM it overrides the default 
|  it sets the source encoding, overriding the primary encoding.

Basically yes.  it overriding the default source encoding (ASCII-8BIT).

|5) Once the script has been parsed (but before it is executed) the 
|source encoding is used to set the primary encoding if the primary 
|encoding was not explicitly specified with -K, -E, or --encoding.

This step is not required as far as I understand.

							matz.