I wouldn't call that an obscure encoding issue, but an absolutely fundamental one. Absent meta information, you can never be sure that some text (or actually an

I wouldn't call that an obscure encoding issue, but an absolutely fundamental one. Absent meta information, you can never be sure that some text (or actually any data) is in a specific encoding (at best, you can be sure that it is not in some specific encoding). As an (indirect) illustration, see polyglots (programs that are valid programs in multiple programming languages simultaneously): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglot_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglot_(computing)