If they're supposed to be UTF-8 and aren't, then certainly normal tools shouldn't have to deal with malformed sequences. If you write a special tool to fix malformed sequences somehow (e.g., delete files with malformed sequences), then of course you're going to be dealing with the byte level and not (just) the character level.
If normal tools completely wet the bed at the sight of malformed sequences, then they are poorly designed. Vim, for one seems to handle garbage characters quite admirably, while working perfectly with well formed ones. If anything, thats a behavior to strive towards. The fact that the designers of certain filesystems and file manipulation tools dont want anything to do with encoding is actually very fortunate. That way you can delete the invalid files without having to use a special tool coded for just such events.
> The fact that your mailer misinterpreted my UTF-8 as Latin-1 does not > instill faith... Maybe you should think more clearly. I didn't write my mailer, so the quality of its behavior doesn't reflect my knowledge.
it does reflect your lack of interesting in getting your email utf-8 compatible. -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
