Front page | perl.perl5.porters |
Postings from August 2011
>> Karl Williamson <public@khwilliamson.com> wrote >> on Wed, 17 Aug 2011 22:00:38 MDT: >> >> > It may be my turn to be mistaken. I don't see anything like that in the >> > current Standard; perhaps I got the impression that they were frowned >> > upon by off-hand remarks in the Unicode mailing list; or perhaps I >> > dreamt it all up. >> >> They are certainly discouraged in UTF-8 streams, where they not only >> serve no purpose but also interfere with catenating streams together >> in a chain: >> >> cat file1.utf8 file2.utf8 file3.utf8 > all.utf8 >> >> *only* works correctly when those files have no out-of-band metadata >> BOMs at their fronts, with the possible exception of the first. >> >I don't see why you think it wouldn't work with BOMs. You'll end up with a >file with a BOM at the front and two ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE (U+FEFF) in >the middle. Because you've change the length of hte file. If I have 3 files each with 10 characters, I require that the catenation of those 3 files produce a file with 30 characters. BOMs are metadata masquerading as data. Do not change the length of my strings by adding data that I didn't put there. That is just wrong. If cat is the wrong tool for working on text files, then you have a really wrong idea of a text file. --tomThread Previous | Thread Next