3 ms·
No kidding, you have not lived until you try and explain UTF-8 to people who only believes in what they called "doublebyte". You think they get it, but surpris
by jmclnx 3y ago
No kidding, you have not lived until you try and explain UTF-8 to people who only believes in what they called "doublebyte".
You think they get it, but surprise happens when a database load fails when loading Chinese Character "string" into a field sized calculated based upon 2 bytes per character.
- theamk 3y agoThank god for emojis! Those people would say, "No one in our org would use chinese" and refuse to fix things... but now I just point them to latest message from upper management which contain emoji or two. (And emoji are such a fine example - once they ate on the table, you need support for combining characters, characters outside of BMP, ligatures.. a large part of Unicode spec)
- throwawaymobule 3y agoIt's a very strange series of events that led us here, with various stages of 'oh no' and 'oh yes' events happening. Like Apple trying to region-lock emojis, or whoever decided merging CJK together was a good idea, or that plan9 dev who scribbled out UTF8 on a napkin.
- qalmakka 3y agoIt's terrible, and we IMHO owe that to some introductory university courses to Java (plus some Win32 veterans). I got very close to being rejected by a professor that was obstinately convinced that Unicode "characters" were 2 bytes because it drunk the Kool Aid in the '90s about Java's `char` type representing a Unicode character. Ugh. I still get angry by thinking back at that sometimes
- jmclnx 3y agoI can relate, I remember a teacher stating "you never have to worry about the amount of memory". This was in the late 90s, I then asked "So I can load a 20 gig data file into memory", he said yes.
- Dylan16807 3y agoI'd say that particular answer is fine, because of mmap.