Re: Unicode education in the professional world

[Philippe Verdy via Unicode]

2017-07-07 19:02 GMT+02:00 Doug Ewell via Unicode :

> Oracle FAQ:

> While UTF8 uses only 2 bytes to store data AL32UTF8 uses 2 or 4 bytes.
>
> Unicode and UTF-8 have been around a long time by now. The fact that
> there is still fake news like this out there, steering our less
> Unicode-aware colleagues waaay down the wrong path, is disconcerting.
>

Well, these are old archived docs that have not been corrected since long.
FAQ's are rarely reviewed once published and frequently become obsolete
when they suggest old solutions for problems that no longer exist, or old
bad workarounds with their known caveats. They were designed only for
specific software versions and kept as is because newer versions are
documented elsewhere (but older versions may still be in use). The
situation is even worse in "community pages": their interest move over time
to something else and noone in these communities have a dedicated mandatory
task to review old documents made by others, no one leads them or can order
them what to to in a scheduled time.

Unicode education in the professional world

[Doug Ewell via Unicode]

Sort of along the lines of "education"...

I've been helping a colleague who is using the Oracle database and
trying to work through a customer's character conversion and mojibake
issues. I started suspecting the NLS_LANG variable and looked up some
references, and found the following alternative facts on the Oracle FAQ
and community pages:

> SQL> SELECT DUMP(col,1016)FROM table;
>
> Typ=1 Len=39 CharacterSet=UTF8: 227,131,143,227,131,170
>
> returns the value of a column consisting of 3 Japanese characters in
> UTF8 encoding . For example the 1st char is 227(*255)+131.

and:

> While UTF8 uses only 2 bytes to store data AL32UTF8 uses 2 or 4 bytes.

Unicode and UTF-8 have been around a long time by now. The fact that
there is still fake news like this out there, steering our less
Unicode-aware colleagues waaay down the wrong path, is disconcerting.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org