Distinguishing between ASCII and UTF8

[Lynn Fredricks]

> On 10/7/10 7:59 PM, Bob Sneidar wrote:
> > Okay, so that begs the question, if there is no difference 
> between UTF8 and ASCII, why make the distinction? I mean, 
> what would be the point to converting from ASCII to UTF8 or 
> vis versa if the results were always the same?
> >
> > Just being practical.

UTF8 is (at a minimum) what you want to internationalize your applications.
You can display and manage most of the world's languages with UTF8, though I
am more partial to UTF16 because UTF8 has some limitations when it comes to
searching/sorting with Chinese characters. Today's operating systems pretty
much use UTF16 and may or may not be slapped down to UTF8.

There used to be ASCII and extended ASCII, though I guess they are simply
just ASCII now.

We use UTF16 internally with Valentina, and in cases where the client cannot
handle it, it gets transformed so its useful.

Valentina was chosen years ago by Nikon Corporation for Picture Project, a
piece of software they shipped worldwide with their digital cameras, because
our Unicode support was so good - it made shipping in so many languages easy
for them.

I still have sweaty nightmares about DOS code pages...

Best regards,

Lynn Fredricks
President
Paradigma Software
http://www.paradigmasoft.com

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