Podcasts Technology Three Devs and a Maybe 24: Understanding Character Sets and Encodings

24: Understanding Character Sets and Encodings

Published: May 14, 2014, 9 a.m.

Having only just recently been bit by the character encoding issue again, we thought it would be a good time to bring it up on the podcast.\nStarting from the beginning with ASCII, we move on to discuss how 8-bit compatible machines brought way to the ISO-8859-* standards.\nThis leads us on to Unicode, with the goal to develop a single character-set encoding standard that could support all of the world\u2019s scripts.\nFinally, we discuss the de-factor character encoding implementation used on the web today \u2018UTF-8\u2019, and reasons why this is the case.