how to set the system default file character encoding to UTF-8?
Hi all. This is driving me nuts, on both my Windows box and Snow Leopard; I figure much more chance of finding the answer for OS X.
My language and locale are set to Australian English. $LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
However, as I believe is expected, OS X (and Windows for that matter) will create files by default with character encoding of Cp1252 (Latin-1). That is, the FILE encoding in the file metadata - the Byte Order Mark I believe. The file itself, not the characters written to it.
This, in a word, bites. I don't want to be restricted to only ASCII by default, and it is causing me problems with certain software (a Firefox plugin) that creates text files, passing in UTF-8 encoded content, which is then mangled because the file encoding itself is still Cp1252. (I know, I've tested this by changing the file encoding manually and having it overwritten again by the plugin: works correctly.)
As a simple example, just `touch somefile` from terminal creates a file in Cp1252 -- I'm obtaining that info by opening in jEdit by the way (anyone know of something better?).
In other locales that are not English-based, I believe the default file encoding is UTF-8. But surely this can be controlled independently? There must be a system configuration value somewhere that specifies file encoding default. Can someone please tell me what it is?
Thanks!
My language and locale are set to Australian English. $LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
However, as I believe is expected, OS X (and Windows for that matter) will create files by default with character encoding of Cp1252 (Latin-1). That is, the FILE encoding in the file metadata - the Byte Order Mark I believe. The file itself, not the characters written to it.
This, in a word, bites. I don't want to be restricted to only ASCII by default, and it is causing me problems with certain software (a Firefox plugin) that creates text files, passing in UTF-8 encoded content, which is then mangled because the file encoding itself is still Cp1252. (I know, I've tested this by changing the file encoding manually and having it overwritten again by the plugin: works correctly.)
As a simple example, just `touch somefile` from terminal creates a file in Cp1252 -- I'm obtaining that info by opening in jEdit by the way (anyone know of something better?).
In other locales that are not English-based, I believe the default file encoding is UTF-8. But surely this can be controlled independently? There must be a system configuration value somewhere that specifies file encoding default. Can someone please tell me what it is?
Thanks!
MBP 15", Mac OS X (10.6.2)
