Does this break the existing file format?
In theory, no, because the data that want in was stripped to 8-bits, so it should generally be ok coming back out, even with the UTF-8 reinterpretation, but there's the possibility that characters about 127 will be misinterpreted as multi-byte.
-- Tom Bradford - http://www.tbradford.org Developer - Apache Xindice (Native XML Database) Creator - Project Labrador (Web Services Framework)
