Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/16
Last year, Waterschap Amstel, Gooi en Vecht sent me a paper letter notifying the yearly water bill was going to be late as they were redesigning their IT systems.
Their letter introduced a classic Mojibake that had not been present in all their older paper letter communication.
"Pyreneeën":
"Pyreneeën":
Posted in Development, Encoding, ftfy, Mojibake, Python, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/09
Nowadays, some 35 years after the first Unicode ideas got drafted and 30+ years after the Unicode Consortium saw the light, UTF-8 is served my more than 95% of the web as shown in yesterday’s post UTF-8 web adoption is huge, closing 100%, but only soured up since around 2006..
I mentioned this:
It means that nowadays there is a very small chance you will see mangled characters (what Japanese call mojibake) when you’re surfing the web.
Below are some issues that happened not too long ago and still happen. I have reported them to all parties involved through web-care, but no response whatsoever, and this is bad: Unicode support beyond basic ASCII for the below systems are still broken even for relatively simple non-ASCII characters based in diacritics decorating a standard ASCII character.
Yes, I know the realm of encoding and code pages is a mess, especially when handling data in multiple layers of an application stack. That’s why I wrote this post in the first place, and have a whole encoding category of blog posts plus a Mojibake subset.
Posted in Communications Development, CP850, Dark Pattern, Development, Encoding, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Mojibake, Software Development, Unicode, User Experience (ux), UTF-16, UTF-8, Windows-1252 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/09
Note: notepad cannot correctly guess the encoding, see the “old new thing”: [Wayback] Some files come up strange in Notepad | The Old New Thing (talking about ANSI a.k.a. Windows-1252, UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE, UTF-8, UTF-7 somewith and some without BOM as Notepad does not understand all permutations)
David Cumps discovered that certain text files come up strange in Notepad. The reason is that Notepad has to edit files in a variety of encodings, and when its back against the wall, sometimes it’s forced to guess.
[Wayback] C# Effective way to find any file’s Encoding – Stack Overflow shows how to detect various byte order marks in C#.
–jeroen
Posted in ASCII, Development, Encoding, Software Development, Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-32, UTF-8, UTF16, UTF32, UTF8 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/08
As a precursor to a post tomorrow showing that serving UTF8 does not mean organisations go without unicode problems, first some statistics.
The first Unicode ideas got drafted some 30 years ago in 1987. In 1991, more than 30 years ago, the Unicode Consortium saw the light. Nowadays more than 95% percent of the web-pages (close to 100% when you include plain ASCII) is served using the UTF-8 encoding.
It means that nowadays there is a very small chance you
will see mangled characters (what Japanese call mojibake) when you’re surfing the web.
Some nice graphs of unicode growth are at these locations are at these locations:
I think especially important are 2008 (when UTF-8 had outgrown all other individual encodings) and slightly after 2010, when UTF-8 alone covered more than 50% of the pages served. These exclude ASCII-only pages. Adding those would make the figures even larger.
Historical yearly trends in the usage statistics of character encodings for websites, June 2021
–jeroen
Posted in Development, Encoding, Software Development, UTF-8, UTF8, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/01/06
Contrary to what many believe is that MySQL utf8 is not always full blown UTF-8 support, but actually utf8mb3, which has been deprecated for a while now.
Only utf8mb4 will give you full blown UTF-8 support.
This when someone reminded me of this in a Delphi application:
When I insert :joy: emoji into mysql varchar filed I got an error :
#22007 Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9F\x98\x82' for column 'remarks' at row 1database charset is
utf8
Note that the :joy: emoji is 😂 and has Unicode code point U+1F602 which is outside the basic multilingual plane.
See:
- Kristian Köhntopp
»Where does PostgreSQL’s collation logic come from?
PostgreSQL relies on external libraries to order strings.
– libc, meaning the operating system locale facility (POSIX or Windows)
– icu, meaning the ICU project (if PostgreSQL was built with ICU support)«- MySQL does things differently:
MySQL binary data files are independent of the host operating system in byte order, number representation (as long as the host fulfils MySQLs basic requirements), collation and even time zone handling.- So MySQL implements collations internally, also to guarantee stability across OS updates.
If it didn’t, a libc update changing collations would mean you have to recreate a lot of indexes. Also, you would not be able to safely move data files from host to host.- MySQL also, for quite some time now, no longer updates its own charsets and collations internally, for the same reason.
So utf8 in MySQL is utf8mb3, the three byte variant of Unicode UTF-8 implementation that covers only the BMP (unicode up to U+FFFF).- When moving to fuller (multiplane) UTF-8 support, a new name was needed, and utf8mb4 was chosen.
So when you actually want modern utf8 in MySQL, you have to use utf8mb4, and now you know why.- utf8 is deprecated and will be upgraded to utf8mb4 in some future MySQL release. This will be a breaking upgrade, and I wonder if it will require dropping and recreating all indexes affected by the change.
That will be painful.- https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/charset-unicode-utf8mb3.html …
utf8mb3 page in the MySQL 8.0 manual, with deprecation notice.
What will change is the meaning of the alias utf8 (currently an alias for utf8mb3).
utf8mb3 Character Set (3-Byte UTF-8 Unicode Encoding)
utf8is an alias forutf8mb3; the character limit is implicit, rather than explicit in the name.NoteThe
utf8mb3character set is deprecated and you should expect it to be removed in a future MySQL release. Please useutf8mb4instead. Althoughutf8is currently an alias forutf8mb3, at some pointutf8is expected to become a reference toutf8mb4. To avoid ambiguity about the meaning ofutf8, consider specifyingutf8mb4explicitly for character set references instead ofutf8.
utf8mb4contrasts with theutf8mb3character set, which supports only BMP characters and uses a maximum of three bytes per character:
- For a BMP character,
utf8mb4andutf8mb3have identical storage characteristics: same code values, same encoding, same length.- For a supplementary character,
utf8mb4requires four bytes to store it, whereasutf8mb3cannot store the character at all. When convertingutf8mb3columns toutf8mb4, you need not worry about converting supplementary characters because there are none.
–jeroen
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Database Development, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Event, MySQL, Software Development, UTF-8, UTF8 | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 