php and encoding, presented without (much) comment

I spend a lot of time dealing with character encoding issues. Getting them just right is important and sometimes tricky, but getting them wrong makes you look like an amateur. This paragraph from a blog post about PHP and encoding made me smile.

Dealing with character sets and encodings is tough. As long as you’re dealing only with English texts you in a luxury situation and can mix utf-8 and iso-8859-1 encoded texts and most (all?) of your tests will work. Some of your users, like me, with strange names (“Schlüter”) will be annoyed as your application breaks them (“Schlüter”), but these will be edge cases.

Written on March 31, 2010