GarfieldTech

When is Unicode not Unicode? When it's UTF-16 instead of UTF-8. Both are properly Unicode character sets, but for reasons that escape me they are not fully compatible. In today's installment of "Fix Microsoft's bugs", we'll look at how to deal with that little problem.

In an earlier entry I talked about different character encodings and how Microsoft manages to break the rest of the world with theirs. Thanks to a chance reading of a SitePoint forum post, I have a little more information on the problem. At least now it has a proper name.

A perennial problem for anyone in IT is the infernal beast known as "smart quotes". Smart quotes, also known as "curly quotes", refers to the angled apostrophe and quotation characters that are often used in print but are not found on any conventional keyboard. There's a number of problems with them. First of all, most people don't realize what they are. Then most people don't understand how they work. And finally, Microsoft broke them.