GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 324610
unhelpful refusal to save when character set problem
Last modified: 2009-05-28 14:25:54 UTC
Please describe the problem: When a character that is not present into the current locale is entered into the text, gedit refuses to save the file. But gedit is completely unhelpful : one does not know which character it is, thus being able to fix the problem and leading to loss of all modifications. This is a bug which happens quite often with non-ascii character sets (nothing exotic here: just French text with an iso-8859-15 locale). Especially when pasting from word processors, which may use special characters (non-breaking spaces and the like). Being unable to save a document is major breakage IMO. There should be at least a "best effort" option. Steps to reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual results: Expected results: Does this happen every time? Other information:
Thanks for the report. While I agree on your points, what I am wondering is if you are explicitely asking gedit to save in iso-8859-15 or if it is the default on your distro (if yes, which one is it?). By default gedit should save the file in utf8 encoded text, thus it should not incur in this kind of problem. That's why the kind of enanchements you are asking have never been been at the top of our priority list. As I said, I agree that these are features that would be nice to have, but if a distro patches gedit to make it save iso-8859-15 by default, I'd consider it a distro bug.
Hi, My distro is Mandriva and it is configured by default in iso-8859-15. As a matter of fact, gedit saves the first time in utf-8 but it reopens files later in iso-8859-15. I've already opened another bug about this ;) (see #321327) I think I might have to open a bug in Mandriva bugzilla.
This is partly a duplicate of 131668 (default encoding when saving) and partly a dup of 164795 (should highlight problematic characters). I'm marking as a dup of 164795 since it's IMHO more interesting, since I think that always defaulting to saving in utf8 is correct. Antoine, I'd be quite interested in hearing back from mandriva people which kind of patch they applied and the rationale behind it. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 164795 ***
> since I think that always defaulting to saving in utf8 is correct Then you are wrong. *What the user wants* is the only correctness criteria in this case. You ***DON'T*** know better. Stop forcing UTF-8 on people. It actually slows down adoption of UTF-8 (which I presume is your goal) because people associate UTF-8 with annoyance, limited freedom and applications' misbehavior and won't touch it with a seven yards pole as a result. If you think that obeying user's will in this case will lead to *more* annoyance for the user in the long run, then *let the user experience it*. You will eventually gain that convert, and in case you are wrong and things work OK for the user, you don't make an enemy for UTF-8. Win-win.