The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - Joel on Software - Trumpi's blog

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - Joel on Software

It has happened many times: I open a console window, type chcp 850, and all who did behold it were amazed. There seems to be little knowledge among many developers about codepages, file encodings and matters relating to globalization. Joel has written a long article on his blog addressing this ignorance. He says:

I've been dismayed to discover just how many software developers aren't really completely up to speed on the mysterious world of character sets, encodings, Unicode, all that stuff.

Source: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - Joel on Software

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Published Friday, September 29, 2006 10:45 PM by trumpi

Comments

# re: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - Joel on Software

I did open the Console Window, and I did type chcp 850 and nothing did happen. Tell you the truth, I thought code pages were a DOS relic. What is supposed to happen?

Monday, October 02, 2006 10:27 AM by bkelly

# re: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - Joel on Software

Code pages will be with us for as long as people save their files using ANSI encoding. Code pages map glyphs to character codes and affect character codes in the [128,255] range.

So if you fire up notepad, type an Afrikaans letter with all sorts of fancy characters that crop up in Afrikaans, and then save the letter using ANSI encoding, then the recipient of that letter would need to view it having the same code page activated. If she does not use the same code page, she risks seeing garbage whenever she views your letter.

Sunday, November 05, 2006 12:44 PM by trumpi

# Code pages continued

I posted recently about internationalisation and code pages here (look at the discussion in the comments).

Thursday, November 16, 2006 9:32 AM by Trumpi's Blog