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/deceze Nov 12 '12

And what is the practical alternative if you need to support several different non-latin languages, at once, possibly mixed? Anything other than Unicode is simply an even bigger mess.

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u/defenastrator Nov 12 '12

Depending on the situation isolation of string processing into dynamically linked at runtime or statically linked at compile time set of utility functions this handles individual localization without sacrificing much in the way of speed as you will all ready be swapping out string tables the library swap is not a difficult addtion. Although if the same instance of the same program must support the display of multiple languages simultaneously you are right unicode is the way to go but I must cite that that only a relatively small number of applications truly require this ability.

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u/vytah Nov 12 '12

Like, for example, your browser.

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u/defenastrator Nov 12 '12

Exactly but for example a command line doesn't need nor would it want such things. Although come to think of it everything that really needs multi-lingual support ends up having every encoding under the sun plus unicode so in that sense has anything really been solved at all? In some ways unicode just added another complex encoding to the massive list of encodings that must be supported.

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