[Python-3000] Help on text editors

[Antoine Pitrou]

Hi,

Le jeudi 07 septembre 2006 à 12:21 -0700, Paul Prescod a écrit :
> If you have access to "German Windows XP", "Japanese Windows XP",
> "Spanish OS X",  "Japanese OS X", "German Ubuntu" etc., I would
> appreciate answers to the following questions. 

French Mandriva (up-to-date development version).

> In particular: what is your default encoding and how did your
> operating system determine it?

My locale is named "fr_FR" and the encoding is iso-8859-15.

> Did you install a locale-specific version? Did the installer ask you?

No, it's the built-in config. I don't remember the installer asking me
anything except the language and keyboard layout.

> What is the relationship between your localization of Gnome/KDE and
> your default encoding? 

Ok, I hexdump'ed a few .mo files (the gettext-compatible files which
contain translation strings) and the result is a bit funny:
Gnome/KDE .mo files use utf-8, while .mo files for various command-line
tools (e.g. aspell) use iso-8859-15.

Also, it is interesting to know that Gnome tools like gedit (the Gnome
text editor) normally default to utf-8, however gedit was patched by
Mandriva to use the system encoding by default (which breaks character
set auto-detection because the Mandriva patch is awful :
http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=20277).


By the way, you should be aware that filesystems have their own
encodings which can different from the default system encoding
(depending on how it's declared in /etc/fstab). I don't know of a simple
way to retrieve the encoding for a given directory (except trying to
find out the filesystem mounting point and parsing /etc/fstab...
*sigh*). This can be annoying when handling non-ascii filenames.

Regards

Antoine.