Item1344: Add encoding to META:TOPICINFO

As part of the preparation for a move to UTF8, we should add an encoding argument to META:TOPICINFO. This argument will take the values specified for the encoding attribute of <?xml, which can be taken from the value of {Site}{CharSet} for current Foswiki.

This would specify the charset encoding that would apply to the rest of the topic data. This is important to support communication with other applications, which currently have no way of knowing what encoding is used in a Foswiki topic.

Of course we still have the problem that existing topics have an "implicit encoding" defined by the charset configuration option, but there's not much we can do about that other than regard that setting as a default for old topics.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 21 Mar 2009

Splendid idea

Do we have a spec somewhere for the TOPICINFO?

Maybe we should have one if we don't?

-- KennethLavrsen - 21 Mar 2009

Yes. MetaData

-- CrawfordCurrie - 20 Sep 2009

I'm switching site encodings, so adding this feature.

-- PaulHarvey - 16 Mar 2011]

Deferring this to Foswiki 2.0.

-- GeorgeClark - 30 May 2014

I disagree. This is absolutely critical to the existing stores for future support for multiply-encoded data with a unicode core, especially when moving raw topic data between different sites, and I feel strongly that it should be supported in RCSStoreContrib and PlainFileStoreContrib. I wrote up a full, detailed, spec in AddEncodingToTXTFiles

I changed the AppliesTo appropriately.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 30 May 2014

I expressed my doubts on AddEncodingToTXTFiles ... this all is still in brainstorming mode, not even a full feature proposal, is it? So why would you still squeeze this into the 1.2.0 release that we are so lagging behind our initial estimates for a release date?

-- MichaelDaum - 30 May 2014

On paper it's a proposal. In code it's an implementation in the PlainFileStore, though not checked in. It simply fell off my radar. I have felt it was a key step for a long time, but other things have always intruded. I thought PaulHarvey had picked it up, but....

-- CrawfordCurrie - 30 May 2014

I am not convinced that what you are doing is the right thing to do (see discussion on the brainstorm topic), nor am I convinced that we need this with 1.2.0. Aren't we in feature freeze?

-- MichaelDaum - 30 May 2014

Neither am I.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 24 Nov 2014

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