Re: Changing encoding of an already loaded buffer

On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 9:20 PM Gabriele F <gbfv@tiscali.it> wrote:
>
> On 09/12/2020 18.47, A. Wik wrote:
> > I don't include utf8 in my default fencs setting because that has the
> > side effect of using utf8 for any newly created files.
>
> Completely off-topic, if you don't have particular needs I'd advise you
> to use UTF- 8 with BOMs for all your new files ('set bomb', 'set
> encoding=utf-8' and 'fenc' left to the default in your vimrc), it will
> prevent any future encoding problem for at least them.
>
> I've been doing so for more than a decade and pretty much never had
> problems, and sigh a relief every time I see I'm working with one of them.
>
> I heard many protest the BOMs in UTF-8, but they are the first thing
> ever to allow a reliable encoding detection and they solve a lot more
> problems than they can cause (if they cause problems they usually do so
> immediately and noticeably, much better than discovering years later
> that you irremediably botched the encoding of some file). So I find it
> absurd to disparage them, and delusive to think that we'll ever get to a
> point when non-utf8 files will be rare enough that we won't need to
> handle them.
> I imagine most of the critics are from countries that never needed more
> than ASCII

IIUC the critics are from people who do a lot of programming, either
in C (where sources are supposed to be in Latin1; they may be in UTF-8
if characters above U+007F are used only in alphanumeric literals, but
they cannot start with a BOM) or in Perl, Python, Unix shell script
language, etc. (where the first two bytes of a source file must be #!
in that order):

The problem with ":setg fenc=utf8 bomb" is that *every* new text file
will start with 0xEF 0xBB 0xBF unless you explicitly turn it off for
that file by means of ":setl nobomb" or ":setl fenc=latin1" or similar
before writing it. For C sources this wil confuse the compiler
(generating an error and preventing successful compilation) and for
anything starting with a shebang (shell scripts, perl sources, etc.)
it will prevent the #! shebang leader from being recognized. OTOH for
"well-behaved" filetypes like Vim scripts (if not run by means of a
shebang), HTML pages, CSS style sheets, etc., there is no problem. So
whether or not to set it should depend on what types of files you
write most often. I use it because most of the files I write are HTML
or CSS, followed by Vim scripts; but then when I write a shell script
I have to remember to turn the 'bomb' setting off for that file.

Best regards,
Tony.

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