8-bit characters -- what in the world are these?

[Benjamin Sher]

Markku Kolkka wrote:

>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. 
>
>  
>
Dedar Markku:

Thanks so much for an excellent brief discussion. So I guess I should 
check the option in Thunderbird in case I get a message from somone 
still using an old email program that does not use Unicode? Right?

Thanks again.

Benjamin

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