- <h3><a name="Character_encoding"></a>Character encoding</h3>
- <h4><i>The character encoding problem</i><br>
- </h4>
-Developers are usually familiar with the ASCII character set. This
-is a character set that assigns a unique number to some characters, e.g.
-an "A" has ASCII code 65 (or 0x41 in hex), and an "a" has ASCII code 97 (or
-0x61 in hex). Some people may also have used ASCII codes for several
-drawing characters (such as a horizontal bar, a vertical bar, or a top-right
-corner) in the old DOS days, to be able to draw nice windows in text mode.<br>
- <br>
-However, these last characters are strictly spoken not part of the ASCII
-set. The standard ASCII set contains only the character positions from
-0 to 127 (i.e. anything that fits into an integer that is 7 bits wide). An
-example of this table can be found <a href="http://web.cs.mun.ca/%7Emichael/c/ascii-table.html">here</a>. Anything that has an ASCII code between 128 and 255 is in principle undefined.<br>
- <br>
-Now, several systems (including the old DOS) have defined those character
-positions anyway, but usually in totally different ways. Some well
-known extensions are:<br>
- <ul>
- <li>the <a href="http://czyborra.com/charsets/cp437.gif">DOS</a>
- character set, nowadays usually known as Code Page 437, but sometimes also
-named LatinUS, ECS (Extended Character Set) or PC-8; note that the table
-displayed in the link also contains the standard ASCII part</li>
- <li>the <a href="http://czyborra.com/charsets/cp1252.gif">ANSI</a> character set, also known as Code Page 1252, and usually the default on Windows</li>
- <li>the <a href="http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859-1.gif">ISO-8859-1</a> character set (also called Latin-1), which is an ISO standard for Western European languages, mostly used on various Unices</li>
- <li>the <a href="http://czyborra.com/charsets/adobe-stdenc.gif">Adobe Standard Encoding</a>, which is by default used in Postscript, unless overridden</li>
- </ul>
-And these are only examples of character sets used in West-European languages.
- For Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, ... there are separate character
-sets in which one byte's meaning can even be influenced by what the previous
-byte was, i.e. these are multi-byte character sets. This is because
-even 256 characters is totally inadequate to represent all characters in
-such languages.<br>
- <br>
-So, summarizing, if a text file contains a byte that has a value 65, it is
-pretty safe to assume that this byte represents an "A", if we ignore the
-multi-byte character sets spoken of before. However, a value 233 cannot
-be interpreted without knowing in which character set the text file is written.
- In Latin-1, it happens to be the character "é", but in another
-character set it can be something totally different (e.g. in the DOS character
-set it is the Greek letter theta).<br>
- <br>
-Vice versa, if you need to write a character "é" to a file, it depends
-on the character set you will use what the numerical value will be in the
-file: in Latin-1 it will be 233, but if you use the DOS character set it
-will be 130.<br>
- <br>
- <h4><i>Unicode</i></h4>
-Enter the Unicode standard...<br>
- <br>