What a Character

Explains Unicode and character encoding to software engineers, and the pitfalls of working with international characters in Java.

Slides

Goes with the What a Character presentation slides.

Code

Code snippets for testing and understanding Java support for Unicode. For additional code, please see utf8db2.

References

Unicode

"So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don't know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I'm going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in a submarine. I swear I will."

Joel Spolsky
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

• An Introduction to Writing Systems & Unicode
• Encoding converter

Java Support

• Supplementary Characters in the Java Platform
• Supported Encodings

XKCD

| | |