Re: UTF_16 question

On Apr 29, 2024, at 12:23 PM, jak via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote:
 
Hi everyone,
one thing that I do not understand is happening to me: I have some text
files with different characteristics, among these there are that they
have an UTF_32_le coding, utf_32be, utf_16_le, utf_16_be all of them
without BOM. With those utf_32_xx I have no problem but with the
UTF_16_xx I have. If I have an utf_16_le coded file and I read it with
encoding='utf_16_le' I have no problem I read it, with
encoding='utf_16_be' I can read it without any error even if the data I
receive have the inverted bytes. The same thing happens with the
utf_16_be codified file, I read it, both with encoding='utf_16_be' and
with 'utf_16_le' without errors but in the last case the bytes are
inverted. What did I not understand? What am I doing wrong?
 
thanks in advance
 
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That is why the BOM was created. A lot of files can be “correctly” read as either UTF-16-LE or UTF-1-BE encoded, as most of the 16 bit codes are valid, so unless the wrong encoding happens to hit something that is invalid (most likely something looking like a Surrogage Pair without a match), there isn’t an error in reading the file. The BOM character was specifically designed to be an invalid code if read by the wrong encoding (if you ignore the possibility of the file having a NUL right after the BOM)

If you know the files likely contains a lot of “ASCII” characters, then you might be able to detect that you got it wrong, due to seeing a lot of 0xXX00 characters and few 0x00XX characters, but that doesn’t create an “error” normally.