In-depth guides on Unicode, character encoding, and developer tools.
When a document arrives without an explicit encoding declaration, software must guess. Encoding detection (sometimes called charset sniffing or encoding detecti...
Unicode releases a new version roughly once a year, adding new characters, scripts, and properties while never modifying or removing existing assignments. Each...
Email is one of the oldest internet protocols, and its encoding rules reflect decades of backward compatibility requirements. From the original 7-bit ASCII cons...
Unicode's breadth — over 149,000 characters from hundreds of scripts — creates security challenges that don't exist in pure-ASCII environments. Characters from...
The challenge of encoding thousands of Chinese characters in a digital format predates Unicode by decades. The two dominant legacy encodings — Big5 (used in Tai...
Before Unicode, the most common approach to internationalization was to use different single-byte character sets for different regions. The ISO 8859 standard de...
One of the most controversial decisions in Unicode's history is Han Unification: the assignment of a single code point to characters from Chinese, Japanese, Kor...
Control characters are non-printing code points that were originally designed to control hardware devices like printers and terminals. Many have been repurposed...
JavaScript's string handling has a quirk that surprises many developers: strings are sequences of UTF-16 code units, not Unicode code points. This is a legacy o...
One of the most significant changes in Python 3 was the strict separation of text (str) and bytes (bytes). In Python 2, strings were bytes with ambiguous encodi...
Choosing the right character encoding for your database is one of those decisions that's easy to get wrong and painful to fix later. The most notorious example...
Percent-encoding (also called URL encoding) is the mechanism for representing characters in URLs that are either not allowed by the URL specification or that ha...