Re:The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know A...
by magicalhippo on Monday October 02, 2023 @11:27AM
(#37739371)
For most software it doesn't really matter either.
I've written unicode-aware software for over a decade, doing a wide variety of programs, and I've never had to bother with all that mess.
If I'm parsing strings I'm looking for stuff in the 7-bit ASCII range which maps neatly onto the Unicode representations, and so I just need to take care to preserve the rest.
The only trouble I've had is that a lot of programmers haven't learned, or don't get, that text encoding is a thing and that it needs to be handled.
So they'll hand me an XML they claim is UTF-8 encoded, except that XML header was just copypasta and the actual XML document is encoded in some other system encoding like Windows-1252. Or worse, a mix of both.
I've written unicode-aware software for over a decade, doing a wide variety of programs, and I've never had to bother with all that mess.
If I'm parsing strings I'm looking for stuff in the 7-bit ASCII range which maps neatly onto the Unicode representations, and so I just need to take care to preserve the rest.
The only trouble I've had is that a lot of programmers haven't learned, or don't get, that text encoding is a thing and that it needs to be handled.
So they'll hand me an XML they claim is UTF-8 encoded, except that XML header was just copypasta and the actual XML document is encoded in some other system encoding like Windows-1252. Or worse, a mix of both.