Abstract
Encoding is the worstâ¼
At first it seems simple â you just add “_utf8” to some methods, and things work. Later, you realize that there’s a “UTF8 flag” that governs whether things will work. Everything gets better! 😃
Except then people start telling you that you’re an idiot, and that this flag isn’t anything to do with Unicode. (They don’t listen when you remind them about its name!)
Why is encoding so stupid? Why is perl so stupid? Why is everyone involved so stupid? Who might exist, stupid enough to try to communicate the answers to these questions?
I’m here to help.
Notes
I gave this talk twice. Once as a fifty minute talk (that ran to nearly double length because they let me back up against lunch) and once as a three hour tutorial. Sadly, the video is for the shorter version. The longer one covered far more topics, and spent less time on “how to do this in Perl”. I’d love to do this talk again, maybe even as a full day workshop. Unicode is part of how we model real human culture into computers, and it’s important that we don’t force people to cut the corners off of their culture!