Re: encoding for i18n

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 1 Apr 2006, at 17:08, Ingolf Jandt wrote:

> I am wondering which encoding to use for Localizable.strings-files.  
> GNUMail and GWorkspace use Latin-1. As I use an @UTF-8 locale, I  
> had to recode their files. (Else they complained ".../ 
> Localizable.strings does not contain string data" or sth similar  
> and switched back to English.) Terminal and AddressManager use 7- 
> bit enc with explicit '\u...' tags. Portable but very unhandy to  
> write.
>
> So my question is: Is there an 'official' or proposed format for  
> Localizable.strings? If not, there definitivly should be one  
> explicit encoding -- guaranteed to work independantly of the locale  
> setting. If it exists, it should be followed more closely.
> (Of course I would try to be helpful in conversion.)

The official encoding for a .strings file is that of a property  
list:  ASCII with \u escapes to unicode as Terminal and  
AddressManager do.

I think you can also safely use UTF8 or UTF16 as long as you start  
the file with a BOM (Byte Order Marker) ... as the code will  
recognize that.

Using anything else (like latin1) is just plain wrong and not portable.
I guess it might be good to make the code generate a warning if the  
file is not portable.