Test from Mark Hansen (mark at markhansen.co.nz)

And do proper utf8 encoding.

Make path.extname return an empty string also if:
- The last dot is not in the last path component
- The last dot starts the last path component

This patch makes buffers the preferred output for fs.read() and
fs.readSync(). The old string interface is still supported by
converting buffers to strings dynamically. This allows to remove the
C++ code for string handling which is also part of this patch.

This reverts commit cbbf9e43.

This patch makes buffers the preferred output for fs.read() and
fs.readSync(). The old string interface is still supported by
converting buffers to strings dynamically. This allows to remove the
C++ code for string handling which is also part of this patch.

There is a difference between errors which happen to a socket - like
receiving EPIPE - an exceptional situation but ultimately okay and the
situation where code throws in a callback - which is not okay.

Fixes test/simple/test-http-exceptions.js

TODO: explain this in docs.

Previously path.dirname('/tmp') incorrectly returned '.'.

Unfortunately module.js incorrectly thinks dirname('/a/b/') should
yield '/a/b', so I can't strip trailing slashes yet. Once module.js
is fixed, then the commented-out code should be activated and a test
written for it.

This is so that syntax errors can be handled discretely in places like the
repl, where SyntaxErrors are expected and normal.

This patch makes buffers the preferred input for fs.write() and
fs.writeSync(). The old string interface is still supported by
converting strings to buffers dynamically. This allows to remove the
C++ code for string handling which is also part of this patch.

Allows to safely decode a utf8 stream into strings without breaking
on multibyte characters.

Also re-adding the callback parameter.

This is be very useful for testing code that deals with buffers.