The game is over, people! - Sorting it all Out - Site Home

NOTEPAD adds a BOM (Byte Order Mark) when you save a file in the UTF-8 encoding.

Always¹.

You'd think that since Windows Notepad has been doing this for over 319680000 seconds², and that the combined usage of Windows 2000³, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP 64-bit, Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2 is so high that it may well blow your mind to calculate the number, that people would have gotten over this by now.

But no.

As recently as yesterday⁴, people were making comments again in that Why are UTF-8 encoded Unix shell scripts *ever* written or edited in Notepad? blog, the one where I officially suggested that these people who don't like the Notepad behavior of inserting a BOM in front of UTF-8 files had a simple remedy:

STOP USING WINDOWS NOTEPAD!

Yet for some reason people are still arguing it.

Please give up, it is over. If you were in a contest or duel for this⁵, then you have lost the contest, been bested in the duel. The game is over⁶.

A long time ago, someone decided that:

if your file was 100% ASCII⁷ and
you chose to save it as UTF-8 and
you opened the file up again and
added some >0x007f character and
later saved again that

you should not be prompted⁸ in a way like this:

This file contains characters in Unicode format which will be lost if you save this file as an ANSI encoded text file. To keep the Unicode information, click Cancel below and then select one of the Unicode options from the Encoding drop down list. Continue?

and so that was the way the feature was coded.

Game over.

There is probably an alt.i.hate.microsoft newsgroup somewhere on USENET that would be happy to hear your complaint on the matter.

But the world has moved on.

And Notepad (the apparent premiere tool of UNIX shell script authors throughout the world) has let down a segment of customers who could have updated whatever is reading the scripts in less than a day, rather than complaining about this on and off for the last ~3700⁹ plus days.

Your sacrifice is appreciated.

But please, go home now.

P.S. Isn't there some tool on UNIX that does this correctly¹⁰?

P.P.S. I will not include a screenshot of my private Notepad; I'm not trying to tease you here that badly....

1 - Well, not on the private Notepad I build from time to time from the Windows source, but that one is not one that is released to the public.
2 - Over ten years, give or take
3 - Where this first started happening.
4 - The day before today.
5 - Which none of you were, who are you kidding?
6 - Even more over than the Canadians in that game last night.
7 - Which ironically, most UNIX shell scripts are.
8 - This is a cool feature too, by the way.
9 - Over ten years, give or take.
10 - By your definition of "correctness", at least - a BOM-less UTF-8 save.