On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 4:23 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:

> My question: What are those non-ASCII characters? How often are they truly latin-1/9 vs. some other text encoding vs. non-string binary data?

I don't know that we can reasonably make that accounting relevant. Number of such characters per byte of text? Number of files with such characters out of all existing files?

I have a lot of mostly english -- usually not latin-1, but usually mostly latin-1. -- the non-ascii characters are a handful of accented characters (usually from spanish, some french), then a few "scientific" characters: the degree symbol, the "micro" symbol.

I suspect that this is not an unusual pattern for mostly-english scientific text.

if it's non-string binary data, I know it -- and I'd use a bytes type.

I have two options -- try to detect the encoding properly or use _something_ and fix it up later. latin-1 is a great choice for the later option -- most of the text displays fine, and the wrong stuff is untouched, so I can figure it out.

What I can say with assurance is that every time I have decided, as a developer, to write code that just hardcodes latin-1 for such cases, I have regretted it. While it's just personal anecdote, I think it's at least measuring the right thing. :-)

I've had the opposite experience -- so that's two anecdotes :-)

If it were, say, shift-jis, then yes using latin-1 would be a bad idea. but not really much worse then any other option other than properly decoding it. IN a way, using latin-1 is like the old py2 string -- it can be used as text, even if it has arbitrary non-text garbage in it...

-CHB

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
Oceanographer

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