On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 2:39 PM, John R Pierce <pierce@hogranch.com> wrote:
> On 09/20/12 10:27 AM, Alan Millington wrote:
>>
>> I am using Notepad, which inserts the byte order mark. Following the links
>> a bit further, I gather that the version of Notepad that I am using may not
>> identify a UTF8 file correctly if the byte order mark is omitted. Also, as I
>> mentioned, Python makes use of it. (From the Python documentation on
>> Encoding declarations: "If the first bytes of the file are the UTF-8
>> byte-order mark ('\xef\xbb\xbf'), the declared file encoding is UTF-8 (this
>> is supported, among others, by Microsoft’s Notepad).")
>
> I've never seen Notepad generate UTF8. Usually its either 8 bit ASCII
> (ISO8559-1 or something), or its UTF16 aka "Unicode".
Those are the defaults; you can tell it to save as UTF-8.
But the general advice is: Don't use Notepad! It can't handle Unix
newlines either (something which annoys me periodically when I'm on a
borrowed Windows machine and need to view a file quickly). There are
many better editors around; Notepad++ was mentioned, and NoteTab is
another good one. My personal preference is SciTE, available for Linux
as well as Windows. You'll start to realize how handy syntax
highlighting is when your next bug is caught even before you save,
because the apostrophe in the quoted string breaks the colorization.
Anything that reduces debugging time can't be a bad thing!
ChrisA