4 ms·

Plain text in what encoding, with what character set? We start adding implementation details and suddenly it's not as straightforward.

• PawelDecowski 9y ago
  UTF-8, Unicode.
  • jancsika 9y ago
    And how do you represent line breaks?
    • davidsong 9y ago
      CRLF unless your audience mostly use Mac or Linux.
      • zlynx 9y ago
        It seems to me the only thing on Windows that cares about CRLF is Notepad. Everything else works fine with just LF. A lot of new Windows software even seems to ship with LF format configuration files. Especially games, probably because it is so common to have a Windows game with Linux backend servers, so the developers are working with both. So anyway, I'd go with just LF unless your software is Windows only.
    • nvader 9y ago
      For most users, you press enter/return on your keyboard. A lot of text editors will detect line endings when opening a file and use that going forward.
  • partycoder 9y ago
    What if you are using another encoding that already works for you? Same as real life alphabets and such?
    • rhencke 9y ago
      Convert it to UTF-8 or UTF-16 and call it a day. Let the fractured world of code pages rest in peace. Unicode may not be perfect, but it sure beats the alternatives.
      • kmicklas 9y ago
        > or UTF-16 Please no. UTF-16 needs to die a painful death.