gabrielmoreira Text Encoding
Use this skill whenever work involves Chinese copy or when terminal output suggests possible mojibake.
Rules
- Treat terminal display and file content as different things.
- Verify suspicious text by reading the file as UTF-8 before concluding the file is broken.
- Prefer editing text files with
apply_patch. - Do not use shell rewrite commands for text files unless the change is narrowly scoped and encoding-safe.
- Do not add fallback logic to hide encoding problems. Fix the source text instead.
Verification Workflow
- If console output looks garbled, read the file again with explicit UTF-8.
- Compare the actual file content, not the terminal rendering.
- If the file is truly corrupted, restore from a known-good git revision instead of hand-fixing large mojibake blocks.
- After edits, re-read the changed file as UTF-8 and spot-check the exact strings that were touched.
Preferred Recovery
- For translation tables or large Chinese copy blocks, prefer restoring the whole file from git history.
- Only do manual line edits when the source file is already clean and the edit scope is small.
Translation Table Policy
- Route reusable UI copy through the translation table.
- Do not mix direct inline bilingual strings with table-driven strings unless there is a deliberate exception.
- When adding a new UI label, ensure the English key exists in the translation table in the same change.
Red Flags
- Strings like
闁,閸,濞,鍙,鈧 - Large sections where punctuation or Chinese quotes become malformed
- A file that looks wrong in PowerShell but correct when read as UTF-8
Done Criteria
- Changed text reads correctly from the file itself in UTF-8.
- No new inline copy bypasses the translation table without reason.
- No encoding workaround code was added.