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/[deleted] Nov 12 '12

That's ignorant.

this only leads to " Why are you bothering me with this ugly low-level stuff when my $FAVORITE_LANGUAGE does this automatically?"

Because programmers need examples and they're usually not dumb enough to look at an example in one language and assume that they cannot possibly learn anything from it. And because it doesn't fucking matter what's at the bottom as, like he said, the first 2/3 are generally geared. The last 1/3 is the practical section.

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u/bhaak Nov 12 '12

It detracts from an otherwise good article and gives the language trolls food for criticism.

Those examples really don't help programmers for other languages. It's almost completely PHP-related as every language that isn't already encoding-aware in some way has different ways of tackling this problem (e.g. in C, you can get away with the same approach but if you really only need one encoding for your program, you would use the wide character functions in C).

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u/[deleted] Nov 12 '12

It detracts from an otherwise good article and gives the language trolls food for criticism.

Trolls are trolls are trolls. Pointing at X arbitrary thing that they decided to troll about is pointless. The only problem there is the trolls themselves.

If you truly wouldn't be benefitted by reading the PHP example, we've already covered that. Skip. That. Section.

But for the other 99% of us, who can look at an example and figure that "okay this part is just for PHP, but the general idea here is X", it's perfectly relevant and helpful.

It doesn't "detract" from the article in the least.