On Aug 16, 2007, at 2:05 PM, David Livesay wrote:

> Thank you all very much.
>
> This particular script is a wrapper for a bunch of shell script  
> snippets (written before I got comfortable with shell scripting--if  
> one can ever be said to be comfortable with shell scripting). So it  
> looks like the text returned from the shell scripts is UTF-16.  
> That's another surprise to me, because UTF-8 is a sort of universal  
> Unix convention. Files you create by redirection (i.e. > or >>) are  
> UTF-8, at least I think so. Of course, if you cat a file that's  
> UTF-16 and redirect it to a file it should still be UTF-16 unless  
> you do something to convert it. In this script it just logs the  
> result of runpsynch.
>
> So what encoding does 'as string' give you, Mac Roman?

I think so.  It used to.  It only really matters for "high ascii" and  
even then not so much.

I also think that some of it varies by system.  I ran tests on  
different operating systems and for when I didn't specify the output  
type they were written out the same.(all macroman or all utf8 not sure  
which)