I was willing to fix a minor thing (the fact that the feature provided in the commit works only with utf8, not any other encoding), then I realize that there are 2 concepts of charsets that are mixed in Dancer (at least I think) :

- the 'charset' setting is used to set the response headers' encoding and charset (see https://github.com/sukria/Dancer/blob/master/lib/Dancer/Handler.pm#L129 )

- the 'charset' setting is used to read files (with this new open_file feature)

These 2 concepts are legitimate, but having them bound to the same setting is error prone : let say you have latin1 template files, and you want your Dancer application to provide UTF8 encoding, you can't. And I can see people trying to fix that by mixing the charset setting, and the ENCODING options of D::P::TemplateToolkit for instance. That will be messy.

The Dancer documentation says that the 'charset' setting is "The default charset of outgoing content". I think that it should be kept this way. the 'charset' setting should not be used for local file reading/writing.

Also, Dancer::Renderer::templates provides a default layout template ( https://github.com/sukria/Dancer/blob/master/lib/Dancer/Renderer.pm#L200 ), but set its charset as UTF-8 by default, which contradicts the 'charset' documentation : "Default value is empty which means don't do anything. HTTP responses without charset will be interpreted as ISO-8859-1 by most clients.". But maybe I missed something, especially the cases where Dancer::Renderer::templates is used.

Anyway, I can see the current situation bite us in the back. Unless I have misunderstood the code, in this case, let me know :)

These steps could fix the situation :

- open_file() should not refer to the same thing used by the Handler to set Dancer headers

- there should be a way to indicate to Dancer that local files read / written are in a given charset

- also, my personal opinion is that the 'charset' setting could be utf8 by default, as utf8 is cool :) But that's not mandatory to fix the issues

Sadly, I don't know how to do that without adding a new setting, something like 'local_charset', or 'files_charset'... which would be used y open_file, the 'charset' be left as it is now, and used only for Dancer responses.