Unicode encoding question

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Erik Max Francis wrote:
> It doesn't matter, as long as all your chat server clients agree.  UTF-8
> or UTF-16 would be the obvious choices; the preference would depend on
> the language(s) you'd typically expect to be used over the server.

Exactly; although IETF suggests to use UTF-8 for new protocols if in 
doubt (as the second-best choice, they suggest to allow multiple 
encodings, with a clear encoding declaration on the wire).

Of course, if the protocol is an *existing* one, like IRC, you'll have 
to stick with whatever the protocol specifies. For the specific case of 
IRC, you will find that the situation is quite muddy.

Regards,
Martin