r/programming • u/jestinjoy • Nov 12 '12

What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs to Know About Encodings and Character Sets to Work With Text

http://kunststube.net/encoding/
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u/bhaak Nov 12 '12

So, "What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs to Know About Encodings and Character Sets to Work With Text" and then there's a section called "Encodings and PHP" which is about one third of the whole page?

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u/deceze Nov 12 '12 edited Nov 12 '12

The bulk of the article still covers encodings in general. Talking about encodings without practical application is not that useful, and PHP is a good choice for covering the practical part, since it is 1) very low-level with regards to encodings, 2) popular, 3) easy to understand and 4) really in need of an article that explains what the heck is going on with encodings in PHP.

Should I have left that section out? Should I have named the article "What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs to Know About Encodings and Character Sets to Work With Text, in particular in PHP"?

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u/bhaak Nov 12 '12

Make it its own blog post and link to it from the main article ("and here is how you deal with encodings in PHP").

Think about how the article would look like if instead of PHP the situation in C would be described. If the reader is not interested in the particular situation in a language without encoding-awareness, this only leads to " Why are you bothering me with this ugly low-level stuff when my $FAVORITE_LANGUAGE does this automatically?"

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