Herouth Maoz wrote on 2003-07-27: > As for vi, I'm a bit mystified about this myself - I removed UTF8 from every > localization file in my system, and still vi opens up with a default file > encoding of utf8. > > Each program has its own behaviour, however. Take vi - it has an encoding, and > then, a file encoding. As it is, I changed the encoding to iso8859-8 in its > vimrc. So when it reads a plain ascii file it assumes a file encoding of utf-8 > and does a (useless) conversion. If, however, the file contains Hebrew > characters in ISO8859-8, it interprets it as an unknown encoding, and loads it > up just fine... Each program has such quirks. > Wild guess: vi is trying to autodetect UTF-8. The probability of a file in non-ascii encoding other than UTF-8 to be decodable as valid UTF-8 is very low (except for extremely short text or texts with very few non-ascii characters). Some programs use this to autodetect UTF-8: no matter what's your locale they first try UTF-8 and only if it doesn't decode correctly they fall back on the locale's defaul encoding. In the case you decribe, a file with no hebrew letters is a valid ASCII file and therefore a valid UTF-8 file, so vi decides it was UTF-8. Being pure ASCII, it would load the same in any encoding but I guess you are upset by it also deciding to save it as UTF-8 even after you add hebrew characters. Again, I'm wildly guessing as I don't even use vi. Most probably this autodetection can be disabled, try to look in vi's systemwide configuration files in addition to your personal one...
-- Beni Cherniavsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> If I don't hack on it, who will? And if I don't GPL it, what am I? And if it itches, why not now? [With apologies to Hillel ;] ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
