invisibles - Developer IT

Text editor capable of viewing invisibles?

- by Timo

A recent problem* left me wondering whether there is a text editor out there that lets you see every single character of the file, even if they are invisible? Specifically, I'm not looking for hex editing capabilities, I am interested in a text editor that'll show me all of the invisible characters (not just the common whitespace / line break characters). The BOM marker is just one example, others are e.g. mathematical invisibles or possibly unsupported characters. I'm not looking for a text editor that simply supports a large variety of text encoding / translations between encodings. All text editors I've come across treat the invisible characters correctly i.e. leave them invisible (or simply get removed in the translation as in the case of the BOM marker). I'm asking this mostly out of academic interests, so I'm not particular about any specific OS. I can easily test Linux and OSX solutions, but if you recommend a Windows editor, I would appreciate if you include descriptions of how the editor handles invisibles other than whitespace / line breaks. *The incident that lead me to this question: I wrote a perl script using TextWrangler and managed to change the encoding to UTF8 BOM, which inserts te BOM marker at the start of the file. Perl (or rather the operating system) promptly misses the #! and mayhem ensues. It then took me the better part of an afternoon to figure this out since most text editors do not show the BOM marker even with various "show invisibles" options turned on. Now I've learned my lesson and will use less immediately :-).

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Fast, Unicode-capable, cross-platform programmer's text editor that shows invisibles like ZWSP?

- by Roger_S

Our publishing workflow includes Windows and Linux machines (there are some Macs too, but not in the critical-path workflow). Many texts include both English and Khmer and are marked-up in XML. XML Copy Editor is the best cross-platform open-source XML editor I've discovered. It utilizes the Scintilla editing component, which is generally good with Unicode but which does not enable non-printing or invisible characters like U+200B (zero-width space) and U+200C (zero-width non-joiner) to be displayed. Khmer does not separate words with a space character as Western languages do, so ZWSP is used in electronic texts to enable applications to break lines easily. Ideally I'd edit the markup and the content in a single editor, but XML awareness is less important at times than being able to display invisibles. (OpenOffice.org Writer and Microsoft Word are the only two apps I know that will display ZWSP. They are not suitable for the markup and text manipulations that need to be done to prepare manuscripts for publication, unfortunately, although I guess they're fine for authoring.) I tried out a promising editor last week, but a search-and-replace regex operation that took under a second in TextPad 4.7.3 lasted over twenty seconds. So I want to mention that speed and the ability to handle large (up to 150mb) files is also a concern. Is there a good, fast, free or not too expensive text editor, with versions on Windows and Linux and maybe mac too, Unicode-aware and capable of displaying invisibles like ZWSP? That has syntax highlighting, can handle large files and is customizable enough that I won't tear my hair out in frustration? Thanks, Roger_S

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Getting gvim to show unicode

- by Rook

How to get GVim (v. 7.3. on Windows XP, if that matters) to show Unicode characters? Something along the lines of http://vimcasts.org/episodes/show-invisibles/ (search for listchars to see the little triangle I'm trying to get). I'm using set encoding, set fileencoding, and set fileencodings, all to utf-8, if that helps. I know it must be something simple, but nevertheless, here I am, stuck. Help.

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Text editor with "forensic" capabilities?

- by Timo

This is what happened: I wrote a perl script using TextWrangler and managed to change the encoding to UTF8 BOM, which inserts te BOM marker at the start of the file. Perl promptly misses the #! and mayhem ensues. It then takes me the better part of an afternoon to figure this out since most text editors do not show the BOM marker even with various "show invisibles" options turned on. Now, I've learned my lesson, I should have used less immediately, etc. etc.. What I'm wondering though is whether there is a text editor out there that lets you see every single byte of the file, even if they are "invisible"?

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Creating "save as" functionality to .eml file in AppleScript

- by unieater

I'm new to AppleScript and trying to figure out how to save a Mail.app message as an .eml message. Ideally, I would like it to act similar to the Mail menu bar actions, in which it saves the message and the attachments together. The workflow is that you have a selection in Mail, hit a hotkey and the function creates a filename (newFile) for the email to be saved. I just need help with how to save the message to the path (theFolder) in an .eml format. tell application "Mail" set msgs to selection if length of msgs is not 0 then display dialog "Export selected message(s)?" if the button returned of the result is "OK" then set theFolder to choose folder with prompt "Save Exported Messages to..." without invisibles repeat with msg in msgs -- determine date received of msg and put into YYYYMMDD format set msgDate to date received of msg -- parse date SEMversion below using proc pad2() set {year:y, month:m, day:d, hours:h, minutes:min} to (msgDate) set msgDate to ("" & y & my pad2(m as integer) & my pad2(d)) -- assign subject of msg set msgSubject to (subject of msg) -- create filename.eml to be use as title saved set newFile to (msgDate & "_" & msgSubject & ".eml") as Unicode text -- copy mail message to the folder and prepend date-time to file name -- THIS IS WEHRE I AM COMPLETE LOST HOW SAVE THE EMAIL into theFolder end repeat beep 2 display dialog "Done exporting " & length of msgs & " messages." end if -- OK to export msgs end if -- msgs > 0 end tell on pad2(n) return text -2 thru -1 of ("00" & n) end pad2

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