Skin file encoding

[Ohytos]

Hello,
I once noticed that after some small modification in the weather skin file I got a letter "B" always showing before the degree sign. I did some probing and it appeared that rainmeter worked differently depending on in which encoding was skin file saved.

So, I used the simplest skin that should only display the degree sign:

Code: Select all

[Rainmeter]
BackgroundMode=2
SolidColor=0,0,32,128

[Text]
Meter=String
X=5
Y=5
W=20
H=15
FontColor=255,255,255,255
Text="°"

UTF-7, UTF-16 BE an UTF-16 BE BOM gave the message "The skin does not contain any meters and will be deactivated".

UTF-8 skin looked like this with the "B" before the degree


UTF-8 with signature was the same as UTF-8 but didn't show the background


And only UTF-16 LE and UTF-16 LE BOM displayed what was expected


So the first question is why does this B appear. And it's not only for degree sign but also for other symbols like ±®µ§©¥¤ and so on. And the second, why rainmeter interprets differently skins with different encoding.
I tried to search but couldn't find anything related. So is it the problem of my system, some bug or I just did not read the documentation?

[jsmorley]

It is my understanding that Rainmeter will properly handle skin .ini (text) files encoded as ANSI or UTF-16 LE (Unicode).

12-14-2011 7-04-35 PM.jpg

12-14-2011 7-05-48 PM.jpg

Rainmeter will not work correctly with a skin in any UTF=7 or UTF-8 or "big endian" encoding.