Unicode -> String problem

[Paul Prescod]

If you don't know the encoding, a bunch of Unicode on a disk is just a
bunch of bits. As long as those bits look a lot like ASCII you are safe,
but if any of them look like something else you run into trouble. IE
probably either a) remembers the encoding of the files or b) uses a
single, internal encoding for the cache. You need to know which it is
before you can work with the information reliably. Consider the
knowledge of the encoding as being almost as important as knowing
whether the files are HTML or PDF.
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