Re: the ASCII debate
Re: the ASCII debate
- Subject: Re: the ASCII debate
- From: Chris Janton <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2002 05:12:44 -0700
For example, if "sort" handles only ASCII characters and your data
contains
any non-ASCII characters, well, obviously they won't get sorted as
desired. If
"sort" handles MacRoman, but your "text" is Unicode stored in either
UTF-8 or
UTF-16, again you may not get the desired results.
Exactly the things I wanted to know. And it will it handle plain text
that
isn't really?
sort (and the Unix it comes from) doesn't know from text. The world
underneath your interface is a stream of bytes (that's the 8 bit
variety). Everything is a stream of bytes. You can't expect much from
programs that manipulate streams of bytes. There's no magic per-byte
metadata out there ;-)
I disagree again :-) The whole question of what is meant by text is
getting
much more important for scripters, with the emergence of Unicode and
the
fact that the underlying OS seems to use different encoding to what
we've
become used to. That affects sorting, comparisons -- lots of stuff.
The underlying OS does *not* use a different encoding...it uses NO
encoding...none...zip...nada... You want encoding? you use a protocol
or standard...you write programs that play by the rules...you come up
with a convention for making a decision about how files are encoded.
*my* encoding used to never get past 7 but more modern things have made
it get all the way up to F...I did graduate from 1 a long time ago ;-)
it's just bytes...
8)
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