At 3:15 PM -0400 8/16/07, Mark Lively wrote:
>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)

MacRoman, and only if you are providing a non-Unicode argument to "write".

write [someUnicode] will make a UTF-16 file on all systems.

write [somenonUnicodestring] will make different results on different 
system localisations. Chris explains that from time to time and you 
may find better information in the Archives: depending on the 
localisation, your "Mac default" encoding is different. For US 
systems, that's the MacRoman encoding, a 8-bit encoding which is 
ASCII for the 7-bit part and which is a thing of its own for the 
higher part.

The unfortunate thing is that no default behavior produces UTF-8 - 
you *have* to specify "as «class utf8»" - which is sad because 1/ 
UTF-8 is basically a superset of ISO 8859, so most often you can 
safely read an ISO file pretending it is UTF-8, 2/ as has been said 
here most UNIX tools use UTF-8 as their output encoding.

Emmanuel