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I've dealt with two elusive bugs which were ultimately caused by Windows stupidly using UTF-8 with BOM by default. Python requires you to take extra steps to de

by TillE 4y ago

I've dealt with two elusive bugs which were ultimately caused by Windows stupidly using UTF-8 with BOM by default. Python requires you to take extra steps to decode that garbage, and some C++ libraries can't handle it at all. I'm sure there were good reasons that BOM sounded like the right idea at Microsoft, but everyone else just used straight UTF-8 and it was fine.

AceJohnny2 4y ago
Windows supported Unicode in 1993 (NT 3.1) and 1995 (Win95) via UCS-2, a fixed-width 16-bit encoding. In 1996, it was realized 16-bit wasn't enough, and was expanded in Unicode 2.0, which also included UTF-16, a variable-width encoding, which required the BOM. Windows 2000 supported UTF-16 on release. Why didn't Windows 2000 support UTF-8, which was invented in 1992 and implemented in Plan9 in that same year? Who can say...