Access Error: invalid UTF-8 encoding ${FFD8FFE0}

Right now there aren't really any books on red since it is so new. So I am trying to follow along an old Rebol book and salvage what I can from it.

I have found a few commands such read where I can't execute the code because of the file encoding.

 save %/c/users/abagget/desktop/bay.jpg read http://rebol.com/view/bay.jpg
 Access Error: invalid UTF-8 encoding: #{FFD8FFE0}

In Rebol this^ would have been read/binary and write/binary

 >> write %/c/alex.txt read http://google.com
 *** Access Error: invalid UTF-8 encoding: #{A050726F}

Is there a way to convert incoming content to UTF-8 so I can do the read? Or are there other types of read that handle non-UTF-8?

Solution

In Rebol this^ would have been read/binary and write/binary

In Red too, save is for converting a Red datatype to a serialized text of binary format. So if you want to save to a JPEG file, you need to provide an image! value. read fetches a text content (limited to UTF-8 for now), so your usage is invalid. The proper line should be:

 write/binary %/c/users/abagget/desktop/bay.jpg read/binary http://rebol.com/view/bay.jpg

Is there a way to convert incoming content to UTF-8 so I can do the read?

To obtain a string from a non-UTF-8 text resource, you need to fetch the resource as binary, and then write a poor's man converter which should work fine for the common Latin-1 encoding:

bin-to-string: function [bin [binary!]][
    text: make string! length? bin
    foreach byte bin [append text to char! byte]
    text
]

Using it from the console:

>> bin-to-string read/binary http://google.com
== {<!doctype html><html itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org...

Red will provide proper converters for commonly used text encodings in the future. In the meantime, you can use such function, or write a proper decoder (using a conversion table) for the encodings you use most often.