4 ms·

Yeah. This is objectively terrible advice. Ideology is not an excuse for data loss.

• theamk 3y ago
  Do you have any specific examples, or are you just saying general statements? Back in the day, I worked quite a bit various encodings (my language had 2 primary one and 2 secondary one, and it was a guess which one the text was), and the data loss usually happened from programs that tried to support encodings. When program would not touch encodings, there might be some mojibake and unreadable text, but you could generally fix things.. I had to write some scripts which changed encoding of filenames and fixup random database or five, but there were no data loss. It's the programs which were "able to tell the difference between, e.g., ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859-15, and UTF-8" which caused data loss. There were so many cases when I ended up with directory full of "?????????" or "aoeoaoao" files and that was it, there is no way to recover. So please don't add Unicode support unless you have to, it is not ideology but rather the results of hard practical experience.
  • torstenvl 3y ago
    > Unless you deal with very old data, just use UTF-8 > I had to write some scripts which changed encoding of filenames and fixup random database or five, but there were no data loss. If you do the first, it is impossible to do the second. Are you just disagreeing for the sake of being disagreeable? Why would you do that?