| Vote for UTF-8 as the default character set for all new text files [message #137730] |
Fri, 09 September 2005 13:10 |
Eclipse User |
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Originally posted by: alex_blewitt.yahoo.com
Eclipse has an option to specify the default character set encoding, and currently defaults to the platform-specified character set. I believe that since Eclipse is a platform-agnostic solution, it should generate platform-agnostic text files as well.
I've raised a bug in Eclipse to support this request:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=108668
The rationale for switching to a UTF-8 character set is that it's the only one that is fully portable between different operating systems. Mac OS X supports UTF-8 files out-of-the-box, Windows has supported it natively since Windows 2000, and most linux distributions have tools (vim, emacs) that are perfectly capable of managing UTF-8 files.
In addition, UTF-8 is backwardly compatible with ASCII documents, and most unaccented documents on current windows systems (Codepage 1250,1251, ISO-8859-x) so for basic text documents (including those found in typical configuration files) are already UTF-8. It will only make a difference to countries that need accents in files; but in any case, these are not portable between operating systems anyway (Macs use MacRoman by default, Windows uses Codepage 125x or ISO-8859-x). You can even have documents that are incompatible between the ISO-8859-x variants.
Unfortunately, you don't get a choice for choosing the default character encoding on most systems. Macs will default to MacRoman, Windows will say they use Codepage 1250 (even though they support UTF-8 in applications natively), and Linux systems are mostly configured with an ASCII variant that few developers will know how to change. So taking the default operating system choice is neither well informed nor an explicit choice by the user.
UTF-8 documents also work well with non-ASCII systems such as mainframes and eSeries machines.
Since I want to make Eclipse better as a cross-platform product (and, since I deal with several operating system types, I want my files to be fully portable between the lot) I would like to enlist your support for UTF-8 as the default text file format for all text files, not just XML. It's even more important for web-based applications, since codepage 1250 characters often don't show up well on non-windows systems and just render themselves as squares.
Please vote for this bug on the Eclipse system at:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/votes.cgi?action=show_bug& bug_id=108668
(Eclipse bug registration required)
Alex Blewitt
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