How important is file encoding? The default for Notepad++ is ANSI, but would it be better to use UTF-8 or what problems could occur if not using one or the other?
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How important is file encoding? The default for Notepad++ is ANSI, but would it be better to use UTF-8 or what problems could occur if not using one or the other?
If you’re sharing files between systems that use differing default encodings, then a Unicode encoding is the way to go. If you don’t plan on it, or use only the ASCII set of characters and aren’t going to work with encodings that, for whatever reason, modify those (I can’t think of any at the moment, but you never know…), you don’t really need it.
As an aside, this is the sort of stuff that happens when you don’t use a Unicode encoding for files with non-ASCII characters on a system with a different encoding from the one the file was created with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake