On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 07:55:33PM -1000, Joel Roth wrote:
>
> On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 08:21:11PM +0200, Michael K. wrote:
> > Hey List readers,
> >
> > i use, under Dev1, XFCE and "geany 1.29" as my default IDE / Text editor.
> >
> > I observe my xsession-errors on this way also, long time ago. But, i
> > can't open my ".xsession-errors" file whit any text editor?
> >
> > A "text editor" tells me on opening the file: this file is a invalid UTF-8
> >
> > what must i do to re-open my ".xsession-errors" in a text editor?
>
> You could:
>
> * See if maybe joe or nano or vim or ??? editor will be more
> accepting of the input.
>
> * Use a hex editor to look for a byte-order-mark (BOM) at
> the beginning of the file, I think some programs choke on them.
> At least I've observed myself "fixing" a file by editing out the BOM.
>
> The BOM indicates whether the text will representated with
> the bits in little or big endian order.

The byte-order mark is quite relevant in 16-bit unicode representations.
but it gets in the way in UTF-8, even if correctly re-encoded as UTF-8.
The convention of using the UTF-8 version of the BOM to identify a file
as being UTF-8-encoded unicode has been used occasionally, but it's not
official, and systems that adhere strictly to spec may well reject it.
I know at one point the gnu C compiler correctly (but annoyingly) did.

-- hendrik