Re: UTF-16 support?

[Nick <nospam codesniffer com>]

Looks like if I change the order of the codecs such that utf16 is listed
first, then Meld displays the file fine.  But then I lose the ability to
view UTF-8 files.  So it seems like it's one or the other, but not both.

If this is true, I don't understand the purpose of being able to specify
more than one encoding in the Preferences dialog.

Can Meld support going through each specified encoding while the file is
not displayable (including the finding that it's a 'binary' file)?  This
will allow me to specify "utf8, utf16" for the encodings which will
support UTF-8 and UTF-16 files to be used in Meld w/out changing the
configuration.

Best regards,
Nick


On Wed, 2013-04-03 at 08:48 -0400, Nick wrote:
> Hi,
>
> First and foremost, thanks for a great diff & merge tool!
>
> My project involves XML files which need to be encoded in UTF-16 Little
> Endian.  I cannot seem to view or diff UTF-16 files with Meld.
>
> In the Encoding tab of the Preferences dialog I have this for the
> codecs:
>
>     utf8, iso8859, utf16, utf-16, utf16le, utf-16le
>
> When I try to open a UTF-16LE file that's in SVN, Meld displays a yellow
> error bar on top which reads, "Error fetching original comparison file".
> I've confirmed UTF-8 files in the repo open fine--it's only an issue w/
> UTF-16 files.
>
> It behaves the same even for files which are marked for addition in the
> repo but not yet added (so in this case, there's nothing to diff
> against, but normally Meld will display the contents of the file
> alongside a blank pane).
>
> I've tried UTF-16 files that contain a BOM and files which do not; no
> difference.
>
> I notice that SVN sets the mime-type on these files as binary
> (application/octet-stream).  If I manually change it to UTF-16LE
> (text/plain;encoding=UTF-16LE), Meld displays a yellow error bar on top
> which reads, "Could not read file" "test.xml appears to be a binary
> file."--but it still doesn't display the contents of the file.
>
> If I call meld and pass it 2 UTF-16 files on the file system (ie. not
> trying to open a file from the SVN listing), I still get a yellow error
> bar on top which reports "Could not read file" "test.xml appears to be a
> binary file."
>
> Is there something else I need to do?
>
> Has anyone used Meld to diff UTF-16 files?
>
> Best regards,
> Nick