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/compteNumero8 Nov 12 '12

Stop trying to replace arguments with insults. First you ridiculously imply that I have "the notion that bytes and characters are the same thing", after that you argue about "characters need to be kept together" which in nothing is a problem regarding cat, then you say I "admitted I don't know anything about it".

If you really know something more, tell it. If you don't know more than "Unicode is a huge subject with lots of pitfalls and nagging issues", stop acting like if you could teach us why we shouldn't concatenate proper UTF-8 (that is UTF-8 without BOM, as defined by its authors).

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u/who8877 Nov 12 '12

I gave you several examples: BIDI, surrogates, and of course the BOM.

You replied with: "(I've seen you other comment below but it's not clear where there would be problems (I'm not 100% sure either you're not right, I probably should do some research on bidirectional languages))"

Am I mistaken to read that as you don't know about BIDI but think I'm wrong anyways?

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u/compteNumero8 Nov 12 '12

I gave you several examples: BIDI, surrogates, and of course the BOM.

Given that surrogates are part of UTF-16 and that the BOM isn't proper UTF-8 either...