[bcab] Re: which encoding should I be using?

Hi Alexander

The Western European ISO encoding (also called Latin-1) and The Western
Windows are 8 bits characters encoding (256 different characters)  The
Western European windows is a superset of the Latin-1 and is (was) used by
Windows internally although these days everything is usually represented  in
Unicode.

In practice, don't worry about it as your software should convert
transparently between these (the difference is mainly in less commonly used
characters as all the basic characters remain the same).

As the world is moving to Unicode encoding which basically can encode all
languages, the encoding which gains popularity for western European
languages is UTF-8 which is a form of efficient use of Unicode for these
languages - you will find that many programs are set by default these days
to UTF-8

You can read more about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252

Again, I would not worry about it, my preference is UTF-8 followed by
Western European ISO as these are international standards.

Regards
Isaac
   
 

-----Original Message-----
From: bcab-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bcab-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Alexander Shannon
Sent: 30 May 2009 22:11
To: bcab@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bcab] which encoding should I be using?

Hi all,

Sorry to send the following again, but I detected a grammatical error in the
message when I received my first message back, so I have corrected it.

For reasons which relate to a news group I belong to, I've been looking at
the encoding of messages I receive both on lists and in News groups, and I
have one question.

As someone who is recieving messages in plain text and using a screen reader
and magnification, I am having no problems reading any messages I receive
but I'm wondering what the difference in encoding terms is between Western
European ISO and Western European Windows, and, which of those two encodings
I should either send messages in, or expect to read messages in.

I apologise for asking such  a complicated question.

Thank you in advance for any replies.

Alexander Shannon


To find out more about BCAB and the benefits that membership can bring,
please visit our website:
http://www.bcab.org.uk/

To manage your subscription to the BCAB mailing list, please visit our
website:
http://www.bcab.org.uk/mailing-list.html

To discuss matters relating to the mailing list, please email
bcab-moderators@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

To find out more about BCAB and the benefits that membership can bring, please 
visit our website:
http://www.bcab.org.uk/

To manage your subscription to the BCAB mailing list, please visit our website:
http://www.bcab.org.uk/mailing-list.html

To discuss matters relating to the mailing list, please email 
bcab-moderators@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Other related posts: