8-bit characters -- what in the world are these?
Markku Kolkka
markkuk at tuubi.net
Sun Jul 3 12:22:23 UTC 2005
Benjamin Sher kirjoitti viestissään (lähetysaika sunnuntai, 3.
heinäkuuta 2005 12:59):
> What, in plain English, is all of this 8-bit character stuff
> about?
8-bit characters are used to write in other languages than plain
English :-) They are the characters that are missing from the
US-ASCII 7-bit character set. "quoted printable MIME encoding"
is a way to encode 8-bit characters into US-ASCII character set
so that software stuck in the 1970's passes it through
undamaged.
> A follow-up question: What is "8-bit characters" in opposition
to? To
> Unicode? If so, in what sense?
UTF-8 encoded Unicode contains 8-bit characters, so you get two
layers of encoding: Unicode -> UTF-8 and UTF-8 -> MIME
quoted-printable.
--
Markku Kolkka
markku.kolkka at iki.fi
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