Question

Recently, I have gotten interested in Text Encoding. As you know, there are many kinds of Text Encoding such as CRC949, UTF-8 and so on.

I am wondering how to express them properly. (To the screen and users.) I mean, they are different from each other. I remember there was particular way to express text accrording to encoding in C#.

Is it possible one can use just simple printf() in C to express string regardless of encoding? Does the compiler automatically do it?

Answer 1

Read Joel Spolsky’s article The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

From the article:

We decided to do everything internally in UCS-2 (two byte) Unicode,
which is what Visual Basic, COM, and Windows NT/2000/XP use as their
native string type. In C++ code we just declare strings as wchar_t
(“wide char”) instead of char and use the wcs functions instead of the
str functions (for example wcscat and wcslen instead of strcat and
strlen). To create a literal UCS-2 string in C code you just put an L
before it as so: L”Hello”.