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October 10, 2003

Plain text

Joel Spolsky:

Please remember one extremely important fact. It does not make sense to have a string without knowing what encoding it uses. You can no longer stick your head in the sand and pretend that "plain" text is ASCII.

There Ain't No Such Thing As Plain Text.

If you have a string, in memory, in a file, or in an email message, you have to know what encoding it is in or you cannot interpret it or display it to users correctly.

It hurts every time I have to say that, too. Luckily, I think, everyone I work with understands it now.