(very late reply, but in case you see it) This Joel On Software article [0] is a good starting point. Incredibly it's now over 20 years old so that makes me fe

(very late reply, but in case you see it) This Joel On Software article [0] is a good starting point. Incredibly it's now over 20 years old so that makes me feel ancient! But still relevant today. The suggestion that the web should just use utf-8 everywhere is largely true today. But we still have to interact with other software that may not use utf-8 for various legacy reasons - the CSV file example in the original article is a good example. Joel's article also mentions the solution discussed in the original article, i.e. use heuristics to deduce the encoding. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minim...