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ikiwiki should support utf-8 pages, both input and output

Currently ikiwiki is belived to be utf-8 clean itself; it tells perl to use binmode when reading possibly binary files (such as images) and it uses utf-8 compatable regexps etc.

utf-8 IO is not enabled by default though. While you can probably embed utf-8 in pages anyway, ikiwiki will not treat it right in the cases where it deals with things on a per-character basis (mostly when escaping and de-escaping special characters in filenames).

To enable utf-8, edit ikiwiki and add -CSD to the perl hashbang line. (This should probably be configurable via a --utf8 or better --encoding= switch.)

The following problems have been observed when running ikiwiki this way:

  • If invalid utf-8 creeps into a file, ikiwiki will crash rendering it as follows:

    Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected continuation byte 0x97, with no preceding start byte) in substitution iterator at /usr/bin/markdown line 1317. Malformed UTF-8 character (fatal) at /usr/bin/markdown line 1317.

    In this example, a literal 0x97 character had gotten into a markdown file.