Refuses to take a text/plain content, expecting text/plain; charset=utf-8

[zoffixznet]

Refuses to take a text/plain content, expecting text/plain; charset=utf-8

[zoffixznet]

Per World Wide Web Consortium:

HTTP 1.1 says that the default charset is ISO-8859-1. But there are too many unlabeled documents in other encodings, so browsers use the reader's preferred encoding when there is no explicit charset parameter.

IMO, for this particular purpose, assuming UTF-8 when nothing is specified is a good default.

[jonathanstowe]

Somewhere I've done "try utf-8 and if that fails do iso-8859-1" which always seems like a reasonable compromise (though may be more effort than warranted in the circumstance,)

[AlexDaniel]

So if it is not utf-8, should it blindly assume that it is utf-8? Or what kind of encoding should it expect?

[MasterDuke17]

I'm in favor of trying anything with a mime type that contains 'perl' or 'text', and defaulting to utf-8 seems reasonable.

[AlexDaniel]

👍

@MasterDuke17, so what's the current behavior if no encoding is specified?

[MasterDuke17]

It will work without complaining.

[AlexDaniel]

more specifically it will default to utf-8. OK.

[AlexDaniel]

I want to write a test for this, but is there any link that will be reliably giving a page with text/plain till the end of our days?

[zoffixznet]

Something on http://httpbin.org/ ? Didn't see an option to generate custom content-type when I skimmed the page though

[AlexDaniel]

@JJ does it really test it though? I think github correctly sets utf-8 so this has never been an issue with github.