On Jun 29, 2008, at 3:07 PM, Allan Odgaard wrote:
Explictly tagging text files with extended attributes to tell the systme that they are UTF-8 is IMO very wrong, especially given that UTF-8 can be recognized with 99.999999% certainty (so even if one disagrees about making it the standard encoding, it can still be at least detected safely without mistakenly treating e.g. a MacRoman file as UTF-8).
According to the Foundation release notes, 10.5 now tries UTF-8 as a fallback if -[NSString initWithContentsOfURL:usedEncoding:error] is used (presumably if xattrs and BOM are absent). Does that answer your suggestion? Personally, I like the idea of using xattrs for this, but we were using them for that purpose before Leopard.
MacRoman is a good fallback encoding if UTF-8 fails, but QL is evidently using it too early. In fact, it looks like NSAttributedString doesn't try UTF-8 and goes right to MacRoman, which probably explains the OP's problem with TextEdit. Very unfortunate.