encoding bugs

24 Apr 2008 · #asides

For a long time, I’ve had trouble with using UTF-8 encoded text on this Tidbits mini blog. The software broke down as soon as it encountered a character that couldn’t be mapped to the standard ascii range. As you may know, Tidbits runs on some home-rolled code so there is no one else to fix such bugs but me :-)

I finally tracked down the cause of this problem. Two causes actually:

1. A missing set encoding=utf-8 in vim’s ~/.vimrc meant I could never reliably edit utf-8 encoded text. So if I copied such text from somewhere else and pasted it in vim, breakage happened.
2. Some bug in web.py’s template module which I didn’t actually have to trace or fix. Just upgrading to the latest 0.23 release resolved that bug.

So finally, Tidbits handles encoding cleanly from end-to-end. Now all I need is a vim function to generated timezone adjusted timestamps and Tidbits would be the perfect little little blog setup!