The absolute minimum you must know about Unicode and encodings

by halb on 7/17/2024, 10:40:34 PM with 2 comments

  • by gnabgib on 7/18/2024, 12:52:59 AM

    (2003) Big in:

    2012 (214 points, 75 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3448507

    2014 (96 points, 37 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6996500

    2010 (61 points, 21 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1219065

    2017 (57 points, 11 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13908703

  • by Terr_ on 7/17/2024, 11:54:43 PM

    IMO one of the pedagogical issues is that people who start with ASCII often assume that the byte-representation (e.g. 0x48) is numerically the same as the code-point (48 in hex and/or 73 in decimal) and vice versa.

    This leads to a mental model of:

        (bytes which are numbers) -> pictures
    That breaks down when you get into UTF-8 which forces people to recognize more steps:

        bytes -> numbers -> pictures
    And then when it comes to things like code-points that might have no visual representation themselves, but modify others, like accents.

        bytes -> numbers -> groups of numbers modifying each other -> pictures