[vim/vim] blob2str() gives strange results when encoding is 'utf-16le' (Issue #19198)

h_east

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Jan 17, 2026, 10:17:17 AM (6 days ago) Jan 17

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h-east created an issue (vim/vim#19198)

Steps to reproduce

:echo blob2str(0z480065006C006C006F00, #{encoding: 'utf-16le'})
['H
e
l
l
o
']

Expected behaviour

['Hello']

Version of Vim

9.1.2089

Environment

Ubuntu 24.04.3

Logs and stack traces

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h_east

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Jan 18, 2026, 7:13:00 AM (5 days ago) Jan 18

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h-east left a comment (vim/vim#19198)

From h blob2str()

	Each <NL> byte in the blob is interpreted as the end of a
	string and a new list item is added.  Each <NUL> byte in the
	blob is converted into a <NL> character.

What!?
I think 0z4800 is the correct character code for H in 'utf-16le'...

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Yegappan Lakshmanan

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Jan 19, 2026, 12:32:31 AM (4 days ago) Jan 19

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yegappan left a comment (vim/vim#19198)

@h-east This is a bug. The current implementation of blob2str() and str2blob() doesn't handle these encodings correctly.

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karan yadav

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Jan 22, 2026, 7:20:01 AM (yesterday) Jan 22

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karan68 left a comment (vim/vim#19198)

working on this bug

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mattn

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Jan 22, 2026, 10:27:47 AM (yesterday) Jan 22

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mattn left a comment (vim/vim#19198)

This bug is troublesome. enc_canonize drops endianness information, convert_setup_ext incorrectly handles UTF-16 and UTF-8, and f_blob2str fails to append the two-byte NUL for UTF-16. (I already have a patch for this)