Character Encoding

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Orrymain

New Member
Joined
May 10, 2009
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I'm not sure if this is the right spot to ask this question or not, so please forgive if it's the wrong topic. I'm in a learning curve right now. I've noticed lately that character encoding on many servers have switched from Western ISO 8859-1 to Unicode UTF-8. Does anyone know the reason why that's happening? What's the big advantage of UTF over 8859?
 
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One difference that I know is that the 8859-1 has more technical support but has less character support. The UTF-8 has more character support but only has a few technical supports.
 
Thanks for the reply, and I hope others who are 'in the know' respond with their insights, too. I have just found this transition that has happened in just the last few months to be very annoying. Instead of quotation marks, I now see question marks. So, depending on what character encoding has been used, I have to manually switch it on each page. It's a real pain.
 
In my experience, UTF is more widely used, so this is a better choice, and also why your new host is using it, though you could try asking them :)
 
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A character encoding is a method of converting bytes into characters. To validate or display an HTML document, a program must choose a character encoding. For documents in English and most other Western European languages, the widely supported encoding ISO-8859-1 is typically used.
 
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