On Wed, 2009-02-04 at 13:31 +0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
Duncan Coutts wrote:
On Tue, 2009-02-03 at 11:03 -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
Will there also be something to handle the UTF-16 BOM marker? I'm not sure what the best API for that is, since it may or may not be present, but it should be considered -- and could perhaps help autodetect encoding.
I think someone else mentioned this already, but utf16 (as opposed to utf16be/le) will use the BOM if its present.
I'm not quite sure what happens when you switch encoding, presumably it'll accept and consider a BOM at that point.
Yes; the utf16 and utf32 encodings accept a BOM (and generate a BOM in write mode). This caused interesting bugs when doing re-decoding after switching encodings, because the BOM constitutes state in the decoder, which means that decoding is not necessarily repeatable unless you save the state (which iconv doesn't provide a way to do).
Are there other encodings that have this kind of state? If so, then they might be restricted to NoBuffering at least when switching encodings.
Yes, I believe there are some Asian encodings that are stateful. Duncan