Juan said:
re:
That's a mighty big assumption to make, don't you think ?
No, not all. It just doesn't make sense to use UTF-8 from a bandwidth
perspective once you need to serve a lot of content in on other
languages or scripts, as one character may require up to six bytes.
Even so, using UTF-8, I haven't found a way
to display characters in the high-ascii 128-255 range,
which several Western European languages require.
Then you've been doing something wrong. Let me quote the Unicode
standard document:
"The Unicode Standard provides 1,114,112 code points, most of which are
available for encoding of characters. The majority of the common
characters used in the major languages of the world are encoded in the
first 65,536 code points, also known as the Basic Multilingual Plane
(BMP). The overall capacity for more than a million characters is more
than sufficient for all known character encoding requirements,
including full coverage of all minority and historic scripts of the
world."
There's no civilized 8 bit encoding that cannot be replaced by Unicode
;-)
I've been able to do that by using iso-8859-1.
If you can display your characters with ISO-8859-1, you have
accidentally or willingly switched the response encoding.
Can you post a sample, using utf-8,
which displays characters in the high-ascii 128-255 range ?
Let's avoid the errors of the past -- there's no such thing as Hi ASCII
or 8 bit ASCII. US-ASCII and all its localized clones (ISO-646-xx) are
7 bit. ISO-8859-x, Windows-125x are built "on top of" US-ASCII.
If you want to see UTF-8 in real live, feel free to visit my homepage
which is running dasBlog and serves content in UTF-8.
I'd be a bit more liable to believe you if you did.
Specifically, if you could show me how to display the
characters ñ, Ñ, ¡, ¿, á, é, í, ó, and ú with utf-8, I'd be grateful.
OK, do the following:
1. Create a new WebForm in a new ASP.NET project. Make sure that your
web.config's <globalization/> looks like this:
<globalization
requestEncoding="utf-8"
responseEncoding="utf-8" />
2. Add a Label control to the WebForm, call it "label" and set its text
in the property control to the empty string.
3. Implement the Page_Load method like this:
this.label.Text = "ñ, Ñ, ¡, ¿, á, é, í, ó, and ú";
4. Run the WebForm -- it should display the text given above.
And that's pretty much it.
See, once you have the characters in a string object and the page is
not rendered correctly, one of the following errors may have occurred:
-- Your browser is configured to use a fixed encoding, which does not
match andf is not compatible with the real encoding (like ISO-8859-1
vs. UTF-8 for non-ASCII content). This will lead to weird or missing
characters in web pages (responses).
-- Neither the HTTP response nor the HTML source specify the character
encoding. In that case, the browser must guess, and of course it can
guess wrong. This should never happen with any decent web application
technology. ASP.NET for example sends a proper
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
HTTP header.
Then there's the case that you have a build-time error. In the example
given above, I've hardcoded the string in my source file. The ASP.NET
page processor needs to know the source file's encoding to decode these
characters correctly -- that's what the fileEncoding attribute of the
<globalization/> element does. If you'd changed that attribute to an
incompatible one or one that cannot represent a given character, that
particular character would be already missing in the resulting string
object. This isn't usually a problem as display text belongs into
satellite assemblies anyway, but for simple applications this needs to
be kept in mind.
I hope this helps.
Cheers,
)