On May 1, 2010, at 10:23 PM, Hamid Haji wrote:

> On Sat, 1 May 2010 21:50:20 +0900, Kino <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> On May 1, 2010, at 9:18 PM, Hamid Haji wrote:
> [...]
>>> Did all that and ran the macro on an Arabic (Windows) test file of 20 pages.
>>> The conversion is instantaneous.
>> 
>> Strange. Do you mean, with Encode::Detect installed, OpenTextFiles macro translated a Windows Arabic file properly? I got
>> 
>> 	Perl reported an error:
>> 	Unknown encoding: x-mac-cyrillic at /Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level/Encode/Detect.pm line 54.
>> 
>> which means that the detector thought my test file to be encoded in MacCyrillic and Encode module did not understand "x-mac-cyrillic". The file in question is "Arabic-win.txt" in
>> <http://www2.odn.ne.jp/alt-quinon/temp/arabicfiles.zip>
>> 
>> Perhaps hasn't your test file already converted into UTF-8?
> [...]
> No. It is Arabic (Windows) file. I also had no problem converting your text
> file "Arabic-win.txt".

curiouser and curiouser... What makes the difference? It is not the first time the Perl module treated Arabic files as encoded in MacCyrillic. I got the same result some years ago when I tried the module for the first time on my old PPC Mac. The same result with SubEthaEdit too, which uses an encoding detector based on the same Mozilla code. Then, perhaps SubEthaEdit detects Arabic encodings properly for you.


Kino