OK, I have a small test file that contains utf-8 codes. Here it is (the language is Wolof)
Fˆndeen d‘kk la bu ay wolof aki seereer a fa nekk. DigantŽem ak Cees jur—om-benni kilomeetar la. MbŽyum gerte ‘pp ci diiwaan bi mu
that is what it looks like in a vanilla editor, but in hex it is:
xxd test.txt 0000000: 46cb 866e 6465 656e 2064 e280 986b 6b20 F..ndeen d...kk 0000010: 6c61 2062 7520 6179 2077 6f6c 6f66 2061 la bu ay wolof a 0000020: 6b69 2073 6565 7265 6572 2061 2066 6120 ki seereer a fa 0000030: 6e65 6b6b 2e20 4469 6761 6e74 c5bd 656d nekk. Digant..em 0000040: 2061 6b0d 0a43 6565 7320 6a75 72e2 8094 ak..Cees jur... 0000050: 6f6d 2d62 656e 6e69 206b 696c 6f6d 6565 om-benni kilomee 0000060: 7461 7220 6c61 2e20 4d62 c5bd 7975 6d20 tar la. Mb..yum 0000070: 6765 7274 6520 e280 9870 7020 6369 2064 gerte ...pp ci d 0000080: 6969 7761 616e 2062 6920 6d75 0d0a iiwaan bi mu..
The second character cb86 is a non-standard coding for a-grave à which is found quite consistently in web documents, although in 'real' utf-8, a-grave would be c3a0. Real utf-8 works beautifully on Macs and under Windows.
I handle the fake utf-8 by using a character map which included the pair { ˆ à } because that little caret is what cb86 generates, and everything works fine ON A MAC for displaying text (in a text widget) like this:
Fàndeen dëkk la bu ay wolof aki seereer a fa nekk. Digantéem ak Cees juróom-benni kilomeetar la. Mbéyum gerte ëpp ci diiwaan bi mu
On a PC - using the same file (shared) the first three characters read in are 46 cb 20 (using no fconfigure). I have run through ALL the possible encodings and can never get the same map to work. There are twenty that will allow 46 cb 86
Sorry this is so long, but if anyone has a clue, I would love to hear it.
Tel Monks