English

Programming With Unicode

Unicode is the nightmare of many developers (and users) for different, and sometimes good reasons. In the 1980’s, only few people read documents in languages other their mother tongue and English. A computer supported only a small number of languages, the user configured his region to support languages of close countries. Memories and disks were expensive, all applications were written to use byte strings using 8 bits encodings: one byte per character was a good compromise. Today with the Internet and the globalization, we all read and exchange documents from everywhere around the world (even if we don’t understand everything). The problem is that documents rarely indicate their language (encoding), and displaying a document with the wrong encoding leads to a well known problem: mojibake. It is difficult to get, or worse, guess the encoding of a document. Except for encodings of the UTF family (coming from the Unicode standard), there is no reliable algorithm for that. We have to rely on statistics to guess the most probable encoding, which is done by most Internet browsers. Unicode support by operating systems, programming languages and libraries varies a lot. In general, the supp

Войдите в бесплатную учётную запись, чтобы читать, скачивать EPUB или слушать.