ruby-marc users, a question.
I am working on some Marc8 to UTF-8 conversion for ruby-marc.
Sometimes, what appears to be an illegal byte will appear in the Marc8
input, and it can not be converted to UTF8.
The software will support two alternatives when this happens: 1) Raising
an exception. 2) Replacing the illegal byte with a replacement char
and/or omitting it.
I feel like most of the time, users are going to want #2. I know that's
what I'm going to want nearly all the time.
Yet, still, I am feeling uncertain whether that should be the default.
Which should be the default behavior, #1 or #2? If most people most of
the time are going to want #2 (is this true?), then should that be the
default behavior? Or should #1 still be the default behavior, because
by default bad input should raise, not be silently recovered from, even
though most people most of the time won't want that, heh.
Jonathan
Received on Tue Nov 19 2013 - 19:52:45 EST