GIAS publishes its CSVs in Windows-1252 and sends no charset. The tap read
resp.text, so requests guessed the codec, and the encoding="latin-1" passed
to read_csv did nothing on already-decoded text. On 3 Oct 2026 the guess was
windows-1250, and "St Thomas à Becket" (138950, 149557) was stored as
"St Thomas ŕ Becket". A different guess on another day would garble other
accented names.
Both streams now decode the downloaded bytes themselves (gias_csv.py). A byte
Windows-1252 leaves undefined becomes U+FFFD with a logged warning instead of
failing the load, so one odd name cannot stop the daily refresh. None of the
nine extracts checked (1 Jul to 3 Oct 2026) contains such a byte.
Checked by running the tap on the real 3 Oct extract with .text forced to
windows-1250: all 52,586 rows decode, with no "ŕ" and no replacement
characters.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
