[aprssig] Please, standardize UTF-8 for APRS

[Heikki Hannikainen]

On Tue, 22 Sep 2009, Keith VE7GDH wrote:

> Ah... when I hit send on this reply, I was told "message character
> conflict" and told it to "send as Unicode"... i.e. UTF-8.

Well, maybe it was sent as Unicode encoded in UTF-8, but Unicode isn't 
always UTF-8. UTF-8 is just one encoding of Unicode. Better be careful 
about this distinction here, as someone might think that just sending 
"unicode" is enough. Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/CE, Java and .NET are all 
using UTF-16 internally (but most of the documentation says that they're 
using Unicode!). But all of them provide easy methods to convert strings 
to UTF-8 before they are transmitted or saved.

Unicode is, sort of, a mapping between the characters and so-called code 
points. Then, the encoding (UTF-8, UTF-16, a few others) defines how those 
code points are transmitted on the network, or saved on the disk, or 
stored in the memory.

Changing your keyboard / language settings actually does *not* change how 
these characters are processed internally in the operating system, or the 
applications, or how they are transmitted on the network. Changing 
those settings just enable you to tap those characters in on your 
keyboard.

Here's a nice little article on the matter. There are some factual errors, 
since it's a bit old, but it gets the point through pretty well.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

   - Hessu