[OT] Re: Re: What's the best plain Documentation format?

Lucky ~~girl~~ boy (thanks particle). If I happened to get a (OK, 30 is too much) 10 years old text in Czech I'm sure I'd at least had to go and search for a charset convertor. And if I'd be lucky I would 1) find out what charset is the text in and 2) be able to find a convertor that still knows that charset.

If on the other hand I'd be unlucky the text would already be "converted" from a charset it's not in. I once wasted several days trying to find out why the heck do the accentuated characters come out wrong only to find out the FoxPro ODBC drivers automaticaly "converted" the strings from cp852 to win1250 even though they were in koi8cs or something. And since I was not able to turn the automatic conversion off I had to convert back and then convert correctly. If the data could talk I'm not sure what would it say.

Jenda
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
-- Rick Osborne

Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature

Comment on [OT] Re: Re: What's the best plain Documentation format?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: [OT] Re: Re: What's the best plain Documentation format? by crenz (Priest) on May 27, 2003 at 15:08 UTC
I agree, although it's not quite as bad for German. You can usually guess the characters and search/replace them -- unless some stupid MTA decided to just throw away that 8th bit instead of using something like MIME. I tend to go UTF-8 for my plaintext docs, and hope it'll be around for a while.	[reply]


laziness, impatience, and hubris
	PerlMonks