Re:The sad history of Unicode printf-style format specifiers...
by tragomaskhalos on Thursday December 01, 2022 @03:32AM
(#33813775)
The fact that in Windows-speak 'unicode' and 'UCS-2' (an encoding) have been used as synonyms has caused a universe of confusion. Even after I grokked the difference I still had arguments with colleagues who remained bamboozled by it. The fact that for a brief time there were only 64k code points, so that you could sort-of fudge the distinction, only made things worse in the long run.
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Re:The sad history of Unicode printf-style format specifiers...
by xurukefi on Thursday December 01, 2022 @03:42AM
(#33813827)
In my experience, most technical people these days still don't know the difference between UTF-8 and Unicode for example.
Re:The sad history of Unicode printf-style format specifiers...
by Tempest1981 on Thursday December 01, 2022 @03:49AM
(#33813877)
Is this the best reference? Too detailed?
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minim...
Re:The sad history of Unicode printf-style format specifiers...
by aew4ytasghe5 on Thursday December 01, 2022 @04:30AM
(#33814144)
You found a quality link.
Re:The sad history of Unicode printf-style format specifiers...
by ChrisSD on Thursday December 01, 2022 @09:10AM
(#33816394)
It does simplify things in places. One thing that isn't covered is that a code point is not necessarily a letter or vice versa. E.g. a single letter/symbol/emoji/whatever can be made up of multiple code points. So it isn't quite true that one "platonic" letter is one code point (it may or may not be).
Re:The sad history of Unicode printf-style format specifiers...
by Spivak on Thursday December 01, 2022 @09:59AM
(#33817049)
If you deal with strings in Python 3 it kinda forces this distinction on you and I think is right to do so. It makes you painfully aware when you're assuming the world is utf-8.
Re:The sad history of Unicode printf-style format specifiers...
by fluoridation on Thursday December 01, 2022 @08:47AM
(#33816126)
Note that Windows uses UTF-16, not UCS-2.
Re:The sad history of Unicode printf-style format specifiers...
by scurvy_steve on Thursday December 01, 2022 @09:09AM
(#33816388)
It uses what's sometimes referred to as WTF-16. It's UTF-16 but with no actual guarantee that its well formed(i.e. invalid surrogate pairs).