Newbie question about text encoding

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Laura Creighton <lac at openend.se>:

> Who cares.   In Europe, among Europeans, we are used to seeing
> Latin1 or Latin2.

No, it's UCS-2 (Windows) or UTF-8 (Linux) -- among us Europeans.

> The idea that the whole world loves utf-8 is nonsense.

Windows people don't care for UTF-8, they don't have to. Linux people
use it. Love is not necessary.

Me, I use en_US.UTF-8.

> Most of europe has been using latin1, latin2 etc. before unicode was
> invented and will, as far as I know, continue to use it. Oldness is an
> indication that latin1 is more likely to be the encoding than uft-8.

Latin-1 is confined to HTML, if even there.

> My data is that, we in Western Europe, have this format pretty much
> all of the time, for everywhere, unless you are only doing local
> encodings (in which case you would use utf-8)

There's a third way, but it's not in Western Europe, as far as I can
tell. Japan is another story. I don't know about Russia.


Marko