On 2012-03-13 02:13PM, Julian Leviston wrote: >What is "text"? Do you store your "text" in ASCII, EBCDIC, SHIFT-JIS or >UTF-8? If it's UTF-8, how do you use an ASCII editor to edit the UTF-8 >files? > >Just saying' ;-) Hopefully you understand my point. > >You probably won't initially, so hopefully you'll meditate a bit on my >response without giving a knee-jerk reaction.
OK, I've thought about it and I still don't get it. I understand that there have been a number of different text encodings, but I thought that the whole point of Unicode was to provide a future-proof way out of that mess. And I could be totally wrong, but I have the impression that it has pretty good penetration. I gather that some people who use the Cyrillic alphabet often use some code page and China and Japan use SHIFT-JIS or whatever in order to have a more compact representation, but that even there UTF-8 tools are commonly available. So I would think that the sensible thing would be to use UTF-8 and figure that anyone (now or in the future) will have tools which support it, and that anyone dedicated enough to go digging into your data files will have no trouble at all figuring out what it is. If that's your point it seems like a pretty minor nitpick. What am I missing? --Josh _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
