The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) is the captivating title of an article by Joel Spolsky.

The catch line was

When I discovered that the popular web development tool PHP has almost complete ignorance of character encoding issues, blithely using 8 bits for characters, making it darn near impossible to develop good international web applications, I thought, enough is enough.

So here are a few meditation themes for the week-end.

  1. How much do you know about Unicode? If you don't, does this lack of knowledge affect you or your work?
  2. Is Perl in much better shape than PHP for Unicode support?

I admit that Unicode has not bothered me that much, and I have survived so far without writing "use utf8" in any of my scripts.

Am I at risk?

In reply to Programmers, script languages, and Unicode by dbwiz

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