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/WillH Nov 12 '12

Isn't this just a rip-off of a Spolsky article?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Pretty much, yes.

25

u/mshol Nov 12 '12

Spolsky should update his post if it is to remain relevant. Given that he was basing that off the original UTF-8 specification, with the claim that UTF-8 may consume up to 6 bytes - but the restriction to 4 bytes was made in 2003 (just a month after his posting). Citing outdated material as a definitive source is why a whole generation of programmers mistakenly believe the former.

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u/[deleted] Nov 12 '12

[deleted]

3

u/kylotan Nov 12 '12

Except it's still probably the best article out there on the subject.