It might - depending on what I intend to do with the file (I still have the offsets of the individual files because I know the original file sizes).<p>API-wise, in my humble experience, it&#x27;s hell to deal with operations that are supposed to work on bit-streams but try to be smart and ask me for encodings of those - this is information I might not even have when building on those basic operations. The &quot;oddities&quot;, how you call them, are the result of not over-abstracting the code to handle yet-unknown problems.<p>You want to concatenate text files with different encodings? <i>Convert</i> them. Expecting a basic tool to do this for you (or carp on &quot;problems&quot;) quintessentially leads to cat converting image formats for you and demanding to know how to <i>combine</i> those images: (addition, subtraction, append to left&#x2F;top&#x2F;right&#x2F;bottom of first image etc).