Markdown Encoding Guard

Markdown Encoding Guard

Use this skill when creating or editing .md files for the user, especially when the files must preview correctly in VSCode.

Required behavior

1. Determine the content language from the user request.

   • If the user explicitly asks for Chinese, write Chinese.
   • If the user explicitly asks for English, write English.
   • If the user does not specify, follow the language used in the current request.

2. Save Markdown files as UTF-8 without BOM.

   • Never save .md files as ANSI, GBK, UTF-8 with BOM, or platform-default encoding.
   • If an existing .md file is corrupted or mis-encoded, rewrite the full file as clean UTF-8 without BOM content instead of repeatedly converting a damaged file.

3. When writing Markdown that contains non-ASCII text, use a writing path that cannot silently replace characters.

   • Prefer writing the file through a Unicode-safe method.
   • If the shell or terminal may corrupt Chinese characters, write via a script that constructs the text safely and then writes with encoding="utf-8".
   • A robust fallback is to construct non-ASCII text through Unicode escape sequences inside the script, then decode and write the final text.

4. Validate after writing.

   • Read the file back using UTF-8.
   • Confirm there is no BOM at the file start.
   • Confirm the expected language characters exist when applicable.
   • Confirm the file does not contain bulk replacement artifacts such as many ? characters where natural language text should appear.

Minimum validation checklist

After creating or rewriting a Markdown file, verify all of the following:

• File bytes do not start with EF BB BF.
• File can be read as UTF-8.
• If the document is supposed to be Chinese, it contains actual CJK characters.
• If the document is supposed to be English, headings and body text are readable plain English.
• The file content is suitable for direct Markdown preview in VSCode.

Preferred workflow

确定语言
-> 生成 Markdown 正文
-> 以 UTF-8 without BOM 写入
-> 回读验证编码和内容
-> 仅在验证通过后交付

Practical guidance

• Keep Markdown structure simple and standard: headings, paragraphs, tables, fenced code blocks, and plain lists.
• Avoid copy-pasting text through terminal paths that have already shown encoding corruption.
• If the user reports preview??, assume the file content may already be damaged; rebuild the text source cleanly before writing again.
• When fixing an existing document, prefer a full clean rewrite over incremental patching if the current content contains mojibake or ? replacement.

Response expectations

When finishing the task, explicitly state:

• the Markdown file path,
• that it was written as UTF-8 without BOM,
• and that a post-write validation was performed.