I was banging my head again a weird text comparison the other day and I have not had any encoding related problems in beyond compare before so it took me quite some time to figure out that this was the case.
I had two UTF-8 encoded files but the second happened to only contain ANSI the first 65000 or so characters. This meant that the first file was correctly determined to have UTF-8 encoding while the second one was incorrectly determined to have ANSI encoding. When special characters started to appear this of course looked very odd. The encoding detection error is 100% repeatable, you just need to create a file with about 65000 non-special characters in the beginning and then have any special UTF-8 encoded character after this.
Even if this is fixed I think that the current highlighing of a mismatch in the detected encoding between the compared files is not obvious enough, I must have missed it for at least 30 minutes and had I seen it earlier I would not have had to spend that much time on it. It would be nice if the highlight was a lot more obvious and really attacts your attention so that you cannot miss it.
I had two UTF-8 encoded files but the second happened to only contain ANSI the first 65000 or so characters. This meant that the first file was correctly determined to have UTF-8 encoding while the second one was incorrectly determined to have ANSI encoding. When special characters started to appear this of course looked very odd. The encoding detection error is 100% repeatable, you just need to create a file with about 65000 non-special characters in the beginning and then have any special UTF-8 encoded character after this.
Even if this is fixed I think that the current highlighing of a mismatch in the detected encoding between the compared files is not obvious enough, I must have missed it for at least 30 minutes and had I seen it earlier I would not have had to spend that much time on it. It would be nice if the highlight was a lot more obvious and really attacts your attention so that you cannot miss it.
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