For the past year, I have been fighting with character encoding problems in order to support a Japanese client. Unfortunately, the application that I am supporting was originally written without internationalization in mind and for a long time, we have been storing shift-JIS text as Latin. Over the past month or so, I have been working on a complete rewrite of that codebase to switch everything over to Unicode, but it has been a painful process. Trying to figure out how it all works has been like finding your way around an unfamiliar room blindfolded. Anyway, I have been successful, but only after a great deal of pain.

Today I ran across an article that I would have liked to have had months ago that gives an easy-to-read overview of character sets and character encoding [Joel on Software]. 11:25:34 AM    comment []