When reading from or writing to files containing text, the system uses a default charset encoding if none is specified. This default encoding
varies between operating systems and system configurations:
- Windows typically uses CP1252 or UTF-16
- Linux and macOS typically use UTF-8
- Some systems may use ISO-8859-1 or other encodings
This creates several problems:
Portability Issues: Code that works correctly on one system may fail or produce incorrect results on another system with a
different default encoding.
Data Corruption: Files containing non-ASCII characters (accented letters, symbols, emojis, or text in non-Latin scripts) may be
read incorrectly or written in a way that corrupts the data.
Silent Failures: Encoding issues often don’t cause immediate exceptions but instead produce garbled text that may only be noticed
later in the application lifecycle.
What is the potential impact?
Files may be corrupted or misread when moved between systems with different default encodings. Non-ASCII characters may appear as question marks,
boxes, or other garbled text. In severe cases, this can lead to data loss or application failures when processing international content.
