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<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.juliobiason.me"><h1>Julio Biason .Me 4.3</h1></a>
<p class="lead">Old school dev living in a 2.0 dev world</p>
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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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2019-07-01
<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/books/">#books</a>
<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/things-i-learnt/">#things i learnt</a>
<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/utf-8/">#utf-8</a>
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<p>Long gone are the days where <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII">ASCII</a> was
enough for everyone. Long gone are the days where you can deal with strings
with no &quot;weird&quot; or &quot;funny&quot; characters.</p>
<span id="continue-reading"></span>
<p>I became a developer in a time when the only encoding we had was ASCII. You
could encode all strings in sequences of bytes, 'cause all characters you
could use where encoded from 1 to 255 (well, from 32 [space] to 93 [close
brackets] and you still have a few latin-accented characters in some higher
positions, although not all accents where there).</p>
<p>Today, accepting characters beyond that is not the exception, but the norm. To
cope with all that, we have things like
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode">Unicode</a> and
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8">uTF-8</a> for encoding that in reasonable
memory space (UTF-16 is also a good option here, but that would depend on your
language).</p>
<p>So, as much as you to make your system simple, you will have to keep the
internal representation of your strings in UTF-8/UTF-16. You may not receive
the data as UTF-8/UTF-16, but you'll have to encode it and keep transmitting
it around as UTF-8/UTF-16 till you have to display it, at which point you'll
convert from UTF-8/UTF-16 to whatever your display supports (maybe it even
supports displaying in UTF-8/UTF-16, so you're good already).</p>
<p>Today, I believe most languages do support UTF-8, which is great. You
may still have problems with inputs coming from other systems that are not
UTF-8 (old Windows versions, for example), but that's fairly easy to convert
-- the hard part is figuring out the input <em>encoding</em>, though. Also, most
developers tend to ignore this and assume the input is in ASCII, or ignore the
input encoding and get a bunch of weird characters on their printing,
'cause they completely ignored the conversion on the output point. That's why
I'm repeating the mantra of UTF-8: To remind you to always capture your input,
encode it in UTF-8 and <em>then</em> convert in the output.</p>
<p>One thing to keep in mind is that UTF-8 is not a &quot;cost free&quot; encoding as
ASCII: While in ASCII to move to the 10th character, you'd just jump 10 bytes
from the start of the string, with UTF-8 you can't, due some characters being
encoded as two or more bytes (you should read the Wikipedia page; the encoding
is pretty simple and makes a lot of sense) and, due this, you can't simply
jump 10 characters 'cause you may end up in second byte that represents a
single character. Walking through the whole string would require traversing
the string character by character, instead of simply jumping straight to the
proper position. But that's a price worth paying, in the long run.</p>
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&lt;&lt; <a href="&#x2F;books&#x2F;things-i-learnt&#x2F;use-timezones">Always Use Timezones With Your Dates</a>
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<a href="&#x2F;books&#x2F;things-i-learnt&#x2F;optimization">Optimization Is For Compilers</a> &gt;&gt;
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