On 29 Jun 2008, at 21:50, Vincent Noel wrote:
I'm ashamed of answering to myself, but I thought maybe this had slipped through the cracks.
Am I the only one with this issue, or am I doing something really stupid and obvious?
Sadly I find that some parts of the OS still assume stuff to be in MacRoman¹ if not explictly told otherwise (and some stuff can’t even safely be told otherwise, like pbcopy/pbpaste).
I’d encourage you to file an enhancement report with http://bugreport.apple.com/ -- Leopard has moved several things to UTF-8 (like osascript), but some stuff is still lacking. 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).
¹ Really the “system encoding” which for US/Western systems will be MacRoman, a thing that comes from Classic.