A few questions about encoding discovery, copying text, and pasting text in one encoding into text in another encoding

Hi Folks,

Newbie here.

I have a few questions about encoding discovery, copying text, and pasting text in one encoding into text in another encoding.

1. I open a text editor and then input a text document. How does the text editor discover what the document's encoding is? Is its encoding stored in the text document? If yes, where and how is it stored? Or is it stored in metadata by the operating system?

2. I have a text editor open and it contains text that is encoded using encoding A. I select some of the text and copy it to the clipboard. What is copied: (a) the characters (glyphs) that I visually see displayed on the screen, or (b) the hex values of each character displayed on the screen, or (c) the codepoints, or (d) something else (what else)?

3. Continuing question 2, when text is copied, is its encoding also copied? Is the encoding stored in the clipboard?

4. I have two text editors open. Text editor #1 contains text that is encoded using encoding A while text editor #2 contains text that is encoded using encoding B. Encoding A is different from encoding B. I copy text from #1 and paste it into #2. Does text editor #2 realize, "Oh my, the text being inserted uses a different encoding so I better convert each of its hex value into the equivalent hex value in my encoding." Is that the way it works?

Any insights you provide will be greatly appreciated.

/Roger
Received on Wed Dec 19 2012 - 10:53:06 CST