Kyle Stanley writes:
> I'll admit though that I have no experience working with any application
> that implicitly assumes MBCS is the default encoding format, is this a
> common occurrence in some older applications?
At least in East Asia, it is. Eg, my university's student information
system for faculty use allows downloading of class lists in CSV
format. Until sometime last year it defaulted to Japan's annoying
MBCS code page 932 ("Shift JIS"). It still allows Shift JIS, but at
least it now defaults to UTF-8. I assume the former default means
that the PHBs got less complaints from people whose software assumes
UTF-8 than from those whose software assumes Shift JIS until
recently. And this is one of the easy migrations, since almost
everybody has used Excel exclusively for about 15 years.
> As a side note, Microsoft recommends
Thank you for this information, but it's basically irrelevant.
Encodings are no longer a technical problem (at least to my non-native
eye Unicode applications are now more likely to display Japanese
correctly and beautifully than the legacy apps), but rather a cultural
and budgetary problem. There is still tons of data in legacy
applications, both as text files and in various application data
formats, that use legacy encodings (in Japanese, that means MBCS).
Sadly, it's not as simple as running "iconv -f shift_jis -t utf-8" on
all the .txt files in sight. That WFM (well, I had to do a few .tex
and .rst files too ;-), but most people are dependent on Word, Excel,
and other application formats, and it's a PITA; VB scripting is a very
rare skill except among the (of course overburdened) technical staff.
Steve
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