That's a bit like saying Kim Jong-un is the best leader in NK :)
Not at all! Well, maybe he is? :) But anyway, about UTF-8:
  1. It's easily recognizable. It's just extremely unlikely that you'll get a (not super short) string that just happens to look like valid UTF-8.

    OTOH, things like UTF-16LE, or (especially) one-byte stuff like Latin-1 "look like" complete binary garbage.

  2. Just remove a couple of random bytes from a UTF-8 string, and you'll lose a couple of characters. All others are still there, completely undamaged.

    Remove a couple of bytes in the middle of a UTF-32 string, and the rest of the string IS binary garbage.

One byte encodings are just not general purpose... Since some users want to use all kinds of characters in their documents. Look: 

абвгд

[download]
Yeah, perlmonks uses a one byte encoding... Windows-1252, I believe.

Now, there could be a self-synchronizing, easily recognizable, fixed-length encoding, but it wouldn't be backwards compatible with 7-bit ASCII. So what did you expect? If it's not backwards, it's not compatible...

In reply to Re^8: Encoding Problem - UTF-8 (I think) by Anonymous Monk
in thread Encoding Problem - UTF-8 (I think) by Melly

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.