Bug : Encoding is not taken into account

[Patrice]

I've noticed the following issue with Rapid PHP 5 (6.3).
(It already appears in some ways in other older topics, but it's still unfixed)

When you select the menu item "HTML > Encoding", the tag <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=xxx"> is added or updated, but, and that is the issue, the way the file is saved doesn't change !
For instance, if I select UTF8 as charset, the file should be saved, from then on, as UTF8. It appears that it is always saved with the same charset. It is perhaps Windows OEM ; when I type in the euro symbol, it is encoded with one byte : 0x80 by Rapid PHP, exactly the way Notepad does when you select ANSI (I use a french version of Windows XP).
I think that Rapid PHP does a raw saving of the file without encoding.

[ljubiccica]

I wanted to ask the same thing but then found a post, where it is sad, that unicode is not supported...

So in the end, do I have to save all the scripts with another Notepad (like notepad2 that is windows compatible) to get the things done?

Because I need the scripts to be in utf-8...

[Karlis]

Unicode will become supported in version 2006 which is due in a month.

[Patrice]

The support of unicode is a very good news.

However, utf-8 was just an example. My remark was that there is, with version 6.3, no encoding at all and that the menu item "HTML > Encoding" is deceptive (it changes things on the surface only). Not all developpers are aware of the encodings issues, and will rely on what appears in the meta tag.

Further more, the real encoding used by Rapid PHP (6.3) is some Windows ANSI (the default Windows ANSI on the user's computer, I think), not the ISO-8859-1 (the default for HTTP documents with MIME "text/"). It's a pity.

So could you, in the next release, make things clearer to us, for instance, by letting us know what encoding is used for the file we are working on, through the status bar or some other way.

By the way, your long list of encodings (do you intend to support them all ?) does not include ISO-8859-1 nor ISO-8859-15. These encodings would be very appreciated by western european developpers (instead of Windows-1252).

Thanks.

[Grzegorz Wiktorowski]

I pointed them here:

http://forums.blumentals.net/viewtopic.php?t=626

http://forums.blumentals.net/viewtopic.php?t=588

http://forums.blumentals.net/viewtopic.php?t=486

So I'm not alone here.

[Karlis]

The current situation is that editor (version 2005) uses the encoding of your Windows locale to display local characters. This means that the default encoding is used and you can not use for example Russian characters if your system default language is French.

Remember that in reality (unless Unicode used) the same characters are used for multiple languages, the question is how they are displayed.

In version 2006 you will be able to use Unicode (UTF-8), so there will be no need for other encodings anymore. You will be able to enter text in whatever language and save the file in UTF-8 format.

Indeed HTML meta tag does not have any influence on how the editor works. Meta encoding tag tells the web browser the encoding of the file, so you should use it to tell Web browsers what encoding is your HTML file using. This is needed because if the file is non-unicode (ANSI) the same characters may be displayed as different symbols for different encodings and the meta tag tells browser how to display these characters.