Understanding Character Sets and Encodings

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. Starting from the beginning with ASCII, we move on to discuss how 8-bit compatible machines brought way to the ISO-8859-* standards. This leads us on to Unicode, with the goal to develop a single character-set encoding standard that could support all of the world’s scripts. Finally, we discuss the de-factor character encoding implementation used on the web today ‘UTF-8’, and reasons why this is the case.

Show Links

• PhalconPHP
• Team Pacific Rowers
• Computerphile
• phpwtf
• wtfjs
• Twitter - fabpot: php -r ‘echo in_array(“foo”, …
• 3v4l - EvAluate your code in our online PHP shell (100+ PHP versions)
• Reversing a String in PHP
• Reversing a Unicode String in PHP using UTF-16BE/LE
• Portable UTF-8 in PHP
• Lazy Load Enabled With AJAX Content
• Foundation Version Control for Web Developers
• Detecting UTF BOM - byte order mark
• Unicode Character Table
• Unicode - Wikipedia
• Unicode <3 JavaScript - YouTube
• Characters, Symbols and the Unicode Miracle - Computerphile - YouTube
• Decode Unicode - Johannes Bergerhausen at TEDxVienna - YouTube
• Pragmatic Unicode - YouTube
• Punycode - Wikipedia
• Understanding Unicode
• Encool Tool - Generate Text with Symbols