4 ms·
By "Unicode" they mean "UTF-8".
by mooism2 17y ago
By "Unicode" they mean "UTF-8".
- pmjordan 17y agoNone of the other explicitly listed encodings are unicode encodings, and the "other" category is tiny. So the statement is still true. Some browsers don't even support other unicode encodings, so this doesn't surprise me. UTF-16 is the only one that even stands a chance; I've never seen UTF-32 used for files, and I've never seen UTF-7 used at all. I suspect UTF-16 is more efficient than UTF-8 for east Asian scripts, but that advantage probably dwindles when content is gzipped. It's good news that Google are now decomposing ligature codepoints, although I do wish they had a version of their search that was literal; especially with programming-related and other technical searches, the special characters it filters out are often crucial.
- robryan 17y agoThere's no way around the symbols being filtered out? I run into this all the time to, always assumed there would be a way around but never bothered to look into it.
- pmjordan 17y agoIf there is a way, I haven't found it. Enclosing the search terms in quotes sometimes seems to help a little.
- blasdel 17y agohttp://www.google.com/codesearch http://www.google.com/codesearch is literal, and even supports regular expressions! The kind of massive indexes needed to support it must be insanely unprofitable given its tiny userbase in a tiny market.
- spolsky 17y agoYes. The distinction between Unicode and UTF-8 is pretty important; Unicode IS NOT AN ENCODING.
- pmjordan 17y agoIt is important, but I don't see anywhere in the article that confuses unicode with its encodings.
- ssp 17y agoWell, UTF-8 is rather brilliant in many ways. It can represent all of Unicode while remaining backwards compatible with ASCII and C string representations. The drawback, that characters have variable encoding, is almost irrelevant, because if you are using character indices, you are almost certainly doing it wrong anyway.