GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 725358
Comparing two files with different encoding shows no differences
Last modified: 2017-12-13 19:07:18 UTC
Hi... I've been debugging a restful interface bug, capturing network traffic with tcpflow, then comparing two requests. In Meld, they look identical (except for the content-length field is off-by-one), but one request generates the following error: indexer_common.searcher.SearchRequestException: com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.io.MalformedByteSequenceException: Invalid byte 2 of 3-byte UTF-8 sequence. It turns out that one file is encoded in utf-8, but the other is in latin-1. As the Content-Type: header I'm sending claims the request is utf-8, the server is right to throw an error. Can meld be modified to either show the encoding at the bottom of the window for each file, possibly highlighting them in color if they're different, or otherwise call attention to this fact? As a further cool enhancement, it would be nice to have a menu option for viewing the files in hex (possibly by filtering through 'xxd'). Note, I'm using 1.7.4 (the current version Ubuntu 12.04 ships with), so if this has been fixed in a later version, please be kind! Thanks for a cool program!
(In reply to comment #0) > Can meld be modified to either show the encoding at the bottom of the window > for each file, possibly highlighting them in color if they're different, or > otherwise call attention to this fact? Maybe? It's a something niche use case, but I can see it. It's also very weird because it strongly suggests that we'd want some kind of dual-statusbar thing going on, which we actually might want for other reasons. Either way, this is fairly low priority, though it might make a cool fairly easy addition if the statusbar situation changed. > As a further cool enhancement, it would be nice to have a menu option for > viewing the files in hex (possibly by filtering through 'xxd'). Yeah that's an old request - see bug 387441. It would be really nice, but a significant amount of work to do properly.
This bug is still around and I was recently bitten by it. Is may appear to be a "low priority" problem but it is something that makes a program, otherwise good, a pile of steaming dump. Reliability is everything and a program that does file comparisons that sees two different files as identical fails its main contract.
Thanks for that. I'm always motivated by descriptions of software I work on as a "pile of steaming dump". I'm sure that your definition of priority is exactly the same as everyone else's, and that moreover it's totally reasonable for you to try and impose it on volunteers.
Sorry for being rude.. I had a bad day...But the problem remains. Meld is good but what I mean is that with such a bug it's a program on which one cannot rely on at professional level. Maybe I can clarify... my boss told me to check if two files were equal... I got my shiny Meld (I was a Kde user until a month ago) and I said that they were... but .. It turned out that they really weren't, and the context was quite sensitive to errors. I made a bad impression :-) I should have been more careful (plain diff would have been enough) but I thought that in such a basic task the program would have performed flawlessly.
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/meld/issues/71.