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134 lines
5.6 KiB
134 lines
5.6 KiB
11 months ago
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html lang="en">
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<head>
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<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
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<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1, viewport-fit=cover">
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<title>Julio Biason .Me 4.3</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/print.css" media="print">
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</head>
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<body class=" ">
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<div class="sidebar">
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<div class="container sidebar-sticky">
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<div class="sidebar-about">
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<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me"><h1>Julio Biason .Me 4.3</h1></a>
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<p class="lead">Old school dev living in a 2.0 dev world</p>
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</div>
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<ul class="sidebar-nav">
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<li class="sidebar-nav-item"><a href="/">English</a></li>
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<li class="sidebar-nav-item"><a href="/pt">Português</a></li>
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<li class="sidebar-nav-item"><a href="/tags">Tags (EN)</a></li>
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<li class="sidebar-nav-item"><a href="/pt/tags">Tags (PT)</a></li>
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</ul>
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</div>
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<div class="content container">
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<div class="post">
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<h1 class="post-title">Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Always Use UTF-8 For Your Strings</h1>
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<span class="post-date">
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2019-07-01
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<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/books/">#books</a>
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<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/things-i-learnt/">#things i learnt</a>
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<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/utf-8/">#utf-8</a>
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</span>
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<p>Long gone are the days where <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII">ASCII</a> was
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enough for everyone. Long gone are the days where you can deal with strings
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with no "weird" or "funny" characters.</p>
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<span id="continue-reading"></span>
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<p>I became a developer in a time when the only encoding we had was ASCII. You
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could encode all strings in sequences of bytes, 'cause all characters you
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could use where encoded from 1 to 255 (well, from 32 [space] to 93 [close
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brackets] and you still have a few latin-accented characters in some higher
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positions, although not all accents where there).</p>
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<p>Today, accepting characters beyond that is not the exception, but the norm. To
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cope with all that, we have things like
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode">Unicode</a> and
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8">uTF-8</a> for encoding that in reasonable
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memory space (UTF-16 is also a good option here, but that would depend on your
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language).</p>
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<p>So, as much as you to make your system simple, you will have to keep the
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internal representation of your strings in UTF-8/UTF-16. You may not receive
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the data as UTF-8/UTF-16, but you'll have to encode it and keep transmitting
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it around as UTF-8/UTF-16 till you have to display it, at which point you'll
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convert from UTF-8/UTF-16 to whatever your display supports (maybe it even
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supports displaying in UTF-8/UTF-16, so you're good already).</p>
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<p>Today, I believe most languages do support UTF-8, which is great. You
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may still have problems with inputs coming from other systems that are not
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UTF-8 (old Windows versions, for example), but that's fairly easy to convert
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-- the hard part is figuring out the input <em>encoding</em>, though. Also, most
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developers tend to ignore this and assume the input is in ASCII, or ignore the
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input encoding and get a bunch of weird characters on their printing,
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'cause they completely ignored the conversion on the output point. That's why
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I'm repeating the mantra of UTF-8: To remind you to always capture your input,
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encode it in UTF-8 and <em>then</em> convert in the output.</p>
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<p>One thing to keep in mind is that UTF-8 is not a "cost free" encoding as
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ASCII: While in ASCII to move to the 10th character, you'd just jump 10 bytes
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from the start of the string, with UTF-8 you can't, due some characters being
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encoded as two or more bytes (you should read the Wikipedia page; the encoding
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is pretty simple and makes a lot of sense) and, due this, you can't simply
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jump 10 characters 'cause you may end up in second byte that represents a
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single character. Walking through the whole string would require traversing
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the string character by character, instead of simply jumping straight to the
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proper position. But that's a price worth paying, in the long run.</p>
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<div>
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<div style="float:left">
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<< <a href="/books/things-i-learnt/use-timezones">Always Use Timezones With Your Dates</a>
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</div>
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<div style="float:right">
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<a href="/books/things-i-learnt/optimization">Optimization Is For Compilers</a> >>
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</div>
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</div>
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</div>
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</body>
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</html>
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