Re: [tlug] Bogus Japanese zipfiles [was: Kudos to Jim Breen]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull.stephen.fw@example.com>]

grb writes:

 > Quickly on the note of shift-jis, another place I still see this is
 > the default encoding of .csv files from financial companies.  I
 > emailed them one to find out why they do that, but as yet no
 > response.

They use the same SI companies that U Tsukuba does, most likely.  When
the U added the "download .csv" option to the class registration
system, I once accidentally forgot to specify UTF-8 when requesting a
class roster in CSV, and the column headers came out in UTF-8, the
rest of the file in Shift JIS.  (Yes, they default to Shift JIS even
today.)  I think this has since been fixed (obviously I've trained
myself to avoid that mistake in the years since, so don't know for
sure), but there remain many, uh, well, "infelicities" in that system.

My guess[1] is that these systems are all enormous dishes of spaghetti
code covered in 3cm of last week's carbonara sauce hacks, and there are
just too many moving parts if you decide to change encodings.  "Don't
fix it if the users have workarounds!" ¯\(ツ)/¯

Footnotes: 
[1]  Supported by Ruby-no-Matz's testimony as to why he left Toyota
and started his own company.