[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #57341] iso-8859-1 encoding triggers error in get_first_help_sentence.m

[Markus Mützel]

Follow-up Comment #7, bug #57341 (project octave):

I felt like we shouldn't treat ISO-8859-1 any more special than any other
encoding. That's why I opted to replace invalid UTF-8 byte sequences with the
replacement character if the mfile encoding is set to "UTF-8".
I don't know how "file -i" determines the encoding of a text file. Maybe it
uses some sort of heuristics (difficult and error prone), or it defaults to
ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) if the file contains invalid UTF? The latter is more
likely because the character sequence in your example file doesn't resemble a
word in any Western language.
It would be no problem to fall back to ISO-8859-1 by default. Is this what we
want to do, though? That would be slightly US/Western centralist, imho.
But it's ok with me if we agreed on that.

It's already possible to correctly read the file prior to the patch by using
the code snippet from the verbatim block in comment #3.

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