At 7:40 AM -0700 8/16/07, David Livesay wrote:
>I opened some logs written by one of my scripts and found it was all 
>full of s?t?u?f?f? ?l?i?k?e? ?t?h?i?s?.?
>
>Turns out the files are all UTF-16. I generally use UTF-8 for 
>everything, and I see no real reason for writing plain old log files 
>in UTF-16. Mac OS Roman would be perfectly adequate, and somehow 
>seems more like what you'd expect to get from AppleScript.
>
>I can't find anything in the Language Guide that suggests you can 
>specify which text encoding to use. All it really says on the 
>subject is that "AppleScript provides partial support for...Unicode 
>Text," which they seem to equate with UTF-16. (Both UTF-8 and UTF-16 
>are Unicode.) In light of that, it seems odd that they would make 
>UTF-16 the default encoding when they say they only provide "partial 
>support," whatever that means, for it.
>
>Does anybody know if it's possible to set the default text encoding, 
>sort of like the way you can set the default text item delimiters?

Let me rephrase Mark's reply:

write someStuff to someFile

will make a UTF-16 file if someStuff contains Unicode text.

So you *have* to specify, either:

write someStuff to someFile as «class utf8» (since you seem to be 
familiar with utf8)

or, as advised by Mark:

write someStuff to someFile as string

Emmanuel