The .htaccess ANSI (ASCII) Format and linked problems

[Bernard TREMBLAY <postmaster@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

As we can pay attention .htaccess must be only redacted in ANSI.

This rule is not absolute :

• The Windows version supports the 3 chars which marks the encoding of the file.

If on Linux a file coming from windows env with is the 3 format coding identification is submitted we get :

INTERNAL SERVER ERROR

I just lost 9 days locked because nobody had the idea to check the file in hexa and had never taking care of the encoding.

Practically if the content is ANSI if will be identical if coded 8859-2 or UTF8 or ANSI and seen identical on editors screens.

Most of editors recognize the format and save into the same is not changed by user.

If accidentally somebody have to save a full project, it can (this is what happens) save in UTF-8 the htaccess file.
On development platform which was windows everything was ok.
When the file have been loading by ftp to the server on linux the error occurred.

So My question and proposal is :

Why all the version will not test for .htaccess if the first 3 chars are not encoding marks and then either threat the following as ASCII (the same as on windows) or send a clear message :

"ERROR HTACCESS file must be encoded ANSI"

This probably will earn time and money to people who have to work with the two platforms and as me have no incident during last seven years...

Best regards

Trebly