Re: Detecting encoding in Plain text

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Tue Jan 13 2004 - 11:34:32 EST

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    Peter Kirk <peterkirk at qaya dot org> wrote:

    >> If a certain Unicode plain text file uses ASCII punctuation OR spaces
    >> OR end-of-line characters, AND the file is not too short or has a
    >> very odd formatting, then the algorithm should work.
    >
    > True. But there may be certain languages (perhaps Thai?) for which all
    > of these circumstances regularly occur together. It would be very
    > inconvenient for users of these languages if programs regularly
    > attribute the wrong encoding to their text.

    Whether this is specifically true for Thai or not -- and I doubt that
    the "short file or odd formatting" condition could ever be considered
    language-dependent -- I would say an otherwise-good heuristic that
    performs badly for Thai ought to have special cases built in for Thai,
    rather than being discarded.

    -Doug Ewell
     Fullerton, California
     http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/



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