ruby-marc users, a question. I am working on some Marc8 to UTF-8 conversion for ruby-marc.
Sometimes, what appears to be an illegal byte will appear in the Marc8 input, and it can not be converted to UTF8.
The software will support two alternatives when this happens: 1) Raising an exception. 2) Replacing the illegal byte with a replacement char and/or omitting it.
I feel like most of the time, users are going to want #2. I know that's what I'm going to want nearly all the time.
Yet, still, I am feeling uncertain whether that should be the default. Which should be the default behavior, #1 or #2? If most people most of the time are going to want #2 (is this true?), then should that be the default behavior? Or should #1 still be the default behavior, because by default bad input should raise, not be silently recovered from, even though most people most of the time won't want that, heh.
Jonathan
