Deprecate / remove support for UTF-16 / CHAR UNICODE

[fisharebest]

To my knowledge, no application has created GEDCOM files using 1 CHAR UNICODE / UTF-16.

I have only encountered some hand-crafted test files.

Since UTF-8 and UNICODE support was first added to the GEDCOM spec, UTF-8 has emerged as a de-facto standard.

It is trivial to create a program/script to convert a UNICODE GEDCOM file into a UTF-8 one. (UTF-16 is a strict subset of UTF-8).

I'd like to propose that we mark UTF-16 as deprecated. e.g.

Support for encodings other than UTF-8 are deprecated, and will be removed in 8.0.0

The only valid value for HEAD.CHAR is now UTF-8. We can remove it.

This would help with #5

[Colinsp]

Family Historian V6 used UTF-16 for its Gedcom. This was replaced with UTF-8 for Version 7 released earlier this year.

On Tue, 19 Oct 2021 at 09:34, Greg Roach @.***> wrote:

To my knowledge, no application has created GEDCOM files using 1 CHAR UNICODE / UTF-16.

I have only encountered some hand-crafted test files.

Since UTF-8 and UNICODE support was first added to the GEDCOM spec, UTF-8 has emerged as a de-facto standard.

It is trivial to create a program/script to convert a UNICODE GEDCOM file into a UTF-8 one. (UTF-16 is a strict subset of UTF-8).

I'd like to propose that we mark UTF-16 as deprecated. e.g.

Support for encodings other than UTF-8 are deprecated, and will be removed in 8.0.0

The only valid value for HEAD.CHAR is now UTF-8. We can remove it.

This would help with #5 https://github.com/FamilySearch/GEDCOM/issues/5

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Colin

www.turnspain.com www.spencer-genealogy.com https://le-fever.org

[tychonievich]

For context:

• FamilySearch GEDCOM 7.0 is UTF-8 only.
• We are not planning to edit the content of any previous GEDCOM specifications
• But we are discussing how to specify (roughly) "all GEDCOM versions ever" as part of the media type specification. Whether deprecation is the right tool for that document or not is not clear to me.