http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding Character encoding is a method of representing human languages (characters: letters, digits, symbols, punctuation) using numbers stored at the machine level (in binary). Conceptually this idea predates computing substantially, consider Morse code. Character Encoding Character Encoding Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding © 2004-2008, Douglas W. Clifton, loadaveragezero.com, all rights reserved. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss en-US doug@loadaveagezero.com (Douglas W. Clifton) 2008-12-25T04:56:00Z 240 http://loadaveragezero.com/drx/search Search the Database q http://loadaveragezero.com/img/fav/drx/logo/drxRSS.gif http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding 88 31 A fully indexed, searchable Resource Directory for Web developers, designers and programmers. http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#unicode:home Regardless of the language, the platform (computer architecture), the country or the software being used, Unicode offers a single, unique encoding (code point or numeric representation) for every possible character. 2005-05-12T15:16:14Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#unicode:home http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form charset encoding unicode Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#yining:lookup There are countless character entity sites out there, and I sometimes forget which one(s) I prefer. This Firefox extension eliminates that issue. Simply open it from the Tools menu and start typing the name or code point and you get a list of matches. 2008-12-25T04:56:00Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#yining:lookup http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form charset encoding extension firefox html Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#purifier:utf-secret This very thorough tutorial is aimed at both the developer and the end-user. It covers some history, finding and fixing encodings, Unicode and UTF, HTTP headers and the HTML meta http-equiv tag, forms, configuring your database, fonts, and PHP functions. 2008-11-06T05:25:27Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#purifier:utf-secret http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form apache charset encoding fonts html http i18n mediatypes php unicode utf8 Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#w3c:i18n The tutorial on character sets and encodings listed below is just the tip of the iceberg if you're interested in learning more about Internationalization (i18n) on the Web. News, articles, techniques, and more on the topic from the W3C are available here. 2008-10-29T18:22:28Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#w3c:i18n http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form charset i18n tutorial unicode utf8 w3c Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#nettleton:cheatsheet LAMP developers who plan on creating sites that support Internationalization (i18n) should stop by this article first. Altering MySQL tables to use UTF-8, installing and configuring the PHP mbstring extension, and changes to their code are all covered. 2008-10-29T09:24:23Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#nettleton:cheatsheet http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form charset config developer i18n install mysql php programming unicode utf8 Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#leftlogic:lookup A nice tool for finding HTML character entities either by name or code point, and a big improvement over manually scanning through hundreds of rows in the many table formats out there. Although it behaves like Ajax, even the data is stored as JavaScript. 2007-06-18T01:40:41Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#leftlogic:lookup http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form charset encoding html javascript markup Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#sitepoint:encoding As usual, Tommy delivers a completely readable and thoroughly detailed article. This time, on character encoding. If this topic is new to you, this is a great overview. Covers various standards, browser support, sending the correct headers and more. 2007-01-20T21:41:39Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#sitepoint:encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form browser charset encoding standards unicode Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#XCER:entity-reference This page contains the 252 allowed entities in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0. The entities are divided and color coded into logical categories which enables the user to filter the tabular view of the characters. Each entity includes name, decimal and Unicode hex. 2005-11-07T05:52:06Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#XCER:entity-reference http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form charset html reference unicode xhtml Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#ICU:project The ICU is a mature and widely used set of C, C++ and Java libraries for Unicode support, software internationalization (i18n) and globalization (g11n). It was expanded from the JDK 1.1 internationalization APIs, which the ICU team contributed to. 2005-08-31T02:14:52Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#ICU:project http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form api c java unicode Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#SIL:non-roman The place to visit for non-Roman authoring resources, including Unicode fonts, licensing information, and an incredible array of articles on translation, linguistics and publishing. From the NRSI, a research and development team within SIL International. 2005-07-29T03:38:31Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#SIL:non-roman http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form encoding fonts resources translation unicode Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#unifonts:gallery Samples of available fonts in many different languages and writing systems include Cirth and Tengwar for you Tolkien fans out there. Confession: I'm one of them. Links to other font resources notably for Linux, FreeBSD and similar open-source OSs. 2005-05-21T01:20:27Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#unifonts:gallery http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form fonts freebsd gallery linux open-source os unicode Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#joel:charsets It's about time I added a listing to one of Joel's articles. This is a great tutorial on character sets and encoding for the uninitiated. After some background and history, he explains Unicode code points and their hexadecimal representation. 2005-05-20T13:54:36Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#joel:charsets http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form charset developer software unicode Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#w3c:tutorial A detailed tutorial on international and special character encoding for Web documents. Presented as a series of slides with navigation. Includes three different views: all-in-one with small images, slide-by-slide with larger images, and text only. 2005-05-20T12:47:18Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#w3c:tutorial http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form charset css encoding html xhtml Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#itechnica:urlencode With PHP's urlencode() and urldecode() functions (and similar methods via CGI.pm and so on), we can usually forget about the details of encoding URL query string values. However, sometimes it's nice to have a reference chart handy. So here you go. 2005-05-15T07:10:06Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#itechnica:urlencode http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form encoding perl php reference url Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#uniplus:resources Tired of seeing those "?" characters on international Web sites? Alan's guides and resource lists include a plethora of tips for enabling Unicode support no matter what your operating system is. And if Unicode fonts are what you're after... 2005-05-13T04:24:44Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#uniplus:resources http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form fonts os unicode Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#nwn:thoughts If you're using XHTML, remember that it is in fact XML, which only supports five named character entities by default. And even declaring a DTD that includes the named varieties is no guarantee all browsers will support them. 2005-05-13T03:56:59Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#nwn:thoughts http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form charset encoding xml Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#EKI:LDB Not the easiest form to get used to, but once you do there is a wealth of information stored in this database. Jukka ("Yucca") is linking to this database from his "Detailed description of the characters" resource. 2005-05-12T16:52:06Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#EKI:LDB http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form charset encoding unicode Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#yucca:chars-and-encodi An incredible amount of detail and history here. The "Detailed descriptions of the characters" under "The ISO Latin 1 character repertoire" is particularly good, and includes full annotation of each character. 2005-05-12T16:29:45Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#yucca:chars-and-encodi http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form charset encoding unicode Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#ianalbert:poster Ian must have been thinking of me when he took on this project. Unbelievable, he has created a 6 x 12 foot wall poster of every Unicode character in the arsenal. I can't even imagine the amount of work that went into it. Fascinating stuff. 2005-05-12T16:06:00Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#ianalbert:poster http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form encoding unicode Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#w3c:entity-HTML Introduction and background to character entities and encoding in HTML 4.01. Includes ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1), symbols, math symbols, Greek letters and markup-significant and international characters. The lists are in DTD format (not exactly friendly). 2005-05-12T15:51:43Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#w3c:entity-HTML http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form charset encoding html w3c Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#evolt:entity-chart An introduction and background on the use of character entities in Web markup (typically HTML) and a nice set of charts that include the named entity, number value, character and description of each character including math symbols and greek letters. 2005-05-12T15:36:02Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#evolt:entity-chart http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form encoding html Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#TRON:history Brief, as in a nap? Phew! Very detailed history of character encoding systems including ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode and TRON. Make a strong pot of coffee, and learn something... 2005-05-12T15:19:59Z http://loadaveragezero.com/app/drx/Data_Formats/Character_Encoding#TRON:history http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php#form charset encoding history unicode Computers/Software/Globalization/Character_Encoding