On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 05:32:51PM -0400, Geoff Steckel wrote: > Using iconv in an editor is EXTREMELY dangerous without complex precautions. > Given a file containing characters not valid in the current locale, > it will at minimum prevent viewing the file.
An editor needs to convert between character sets. How else are you going to display a latin1 file in a UTF-8 locale, for example? If the current character set of the locale cannot display your file because conversion from file source encoding to output encoding fails, tough, you'll have display problems. What else is an application supposed to do in this case? It's being asked to do something impossible. BTW, vim links to libiconv. For some bizarre reason emacs links to libossaudio instead ;) > If the file is written out, the file is destroyed. > IMnsHO, that is fatally flawed. Well, yes, using a character set conversion API in stupid ways can munge data. How does that relate to anything I was saying?
