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From: Harald Oehlmann <wortkarg3@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.tcl
Subject: Re: Tcl 8.6 vs 9.0 encoding plus some general confusion
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2025 08:55:21 +0200
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Am 23.06.2025 um 18:35 schrieb Ralf Fassel:
> * Rich <rich@example.invalid>
> | Ralf Fassel <ralfixx@gmx.de> wrote:
> | >     ## Notable incompatibilities
> | >      - Removed the encoding alias `binary` to `iso8859-1`.
>>
> | This feels like unnecesary exposure of internal details that an end
> | user is not concerned about.
>>
> | A user wants to read "binary" data, it would seem that they would
> | expect to use "binary" as the name for that "encoding" (well, really, a
> | lack of any encoding).  If it indeed was mapped to iso8859-1
> | internally, that is an internal implemntation detail that is of no
> | concern to them.
> 
> The tcl-9 manpage is not clear on this topic IMHO:
> 
>    https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl/TclCmd/chan.html
> 
> On the one hand, it states for -encoding:
>    https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl/TclCmd/chan.html#M11
>    
>      If a file contains pure binary data (for instance, a JPEG image), the
>      encoding for the channel should be configured to be iso8859-1. Tcl will
>      then assign no interpretation to the data in the file and simply read or
>      write raw bytes.
> 
> Two sentences later:
>      It is usually better to set the -translation option to binary when
>      you want to transfer binary data, as this turns off the other
>      automatic interpretations of the bytes in the stream as well.
> 
> And for -translation:
>    https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl/TclCmd/chan.html#M17
>      binary
>        Like lf, no end-of-line translation is performed, but in addition,
>        sets -eofchar to the empty string to disable it, and sets
>        -encoding to iso8859-1.
> 
> This sounds to me that configuring only "-encoding iso8859-1" is *not*
> enough to read binary data (since crlf translation and eofchar handling
> might still apply), and that the "usually better" should really read
> "necessary to".
> 
> R'

Yes, "-translation binary" has also the advantage to work on 8.6 and 9.0.