I have the problem with Thunderbird, which allows me to specify the character encoding, though it will Auto-Detect. If you want more, there’s an extensive article on Unicode at Wikipedia. If an interpreter thinks it’s looking at 8859-1, it goes wrong when it sees a byte with the top bit set (i.e. ISO-8859-1 is a one-byte encoding that happens to be identical to UTF-8, for the first 128 characters only. Where UTF-8 needs only one byte, UCS-2 wastes one byte however, the fixed character width of UCS-2 is easier to process for such apps as Word.
#Weird characters at sign in for chrome mac code
UCS-2 is actually a subset of Unicode, which encodes the first 64,000 code points (there are more!) as two bytes. UTF-8 is a method of encoding each code point as a variable number of (8-bit) bytes, at least one and possibly as many as three. ‘Unicode’ is an encoding of characters as integers, which it calls code points. If you can, configure your email program to send in UTF-8 encoding (many, if not most, don’t make this easily configurable).īut regardless of how you got here, at least now you’ll know why. I know that “Smart Quotes”, while nice in printed documents, causes me enough grief elsewhere that it’s one of the first options I turn off when configuring Microsoft Word. The solution? Ideally, watch what you’re typing. When that gets sent in or displayed using ISO-8859-1 encoding, you get the results above. In particular, the “Smart Quotes” option in Word will often replace a plain apostrophe (‘) with an acute accent (´) or – as we saw above – right single quote (’). Use Word to edit your email or your web page? Then you probably did. I can hear you saying “but I didn’t type in any special characters!”. In the later case the email program has to do “something”, and that may include sending the character anyway, in one encoding scheme, even though the message is flagged as being in another. The problem is that some get it wrong, or, as you compose mail you enter characters that cannot actually be represented by the current encoding scheme. What was one character in UTF-8 (’) gets mistakenly displayed as three (’) when misinterpreted as ISO-8859-1.Įmail programs: email messages can include, as part of the header information you don’t see, the type of encoding used to represent the contents of the message.
#Weird characters at sign in for chrome mac series
Now, what happens when the UTF-8 series of numbers is interpreted as if it were ISO-8859-1?Ġ圎28099 breaks down as 0圎2 (â), 0x80 (€) and 0x99 (™). I don’t expect you to care about the actual numbers there, but simply notice how dramatically different they are.
Let’s take the right single quote (for reasons I’ll explain below): )Įach, of course has a different encoding. (Those might look similar, different, or not appear at all depending on the fonts and character sets available on your computer. In reality the characters we often refer to as apostrophes could be: When you see funny characters it’s because data encoded using UTF-8 is likely being interpreted as ISO-8859-1.įirst, let’s be clear as mud: there are apostrophes, and apostrophes. Messages remain smaller, but should one of those “other” characters be needed it can be incorporated by using its “longer” representation.Īll that is a lot of back story to the problem. In UTF-8 the entire Unicode character set is broken down by an algorithm into byte sequences that are either 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes long. The reason is simple: the vast majority of characters in common usage in Western languages fall into the 1 byte range. Possible, and in some cases even the right solution, but when you consider that the majority of communications, particularly in the western world, focus on the basic roman alphabet and a few numbers and punctuation, it starts to seem wasteful.Įnter “UTF-8”, for “8 bit Unicode Transformation Format”. “A” is still 65, but if we look at it in hexadecimal the single byte Ascii “A” is 41, while the two-byte Unicode “A” is 0041.Īt this point, it should be clear that switching from Ascii to Unicode would immediately double the size of every email, every document, and everything else that stored text.
The problem, of course, is that there are way more than 256 possible characters. While we might spend most of our time with common characters like A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and a handful of punctuation, in reality the there are thousands of other possible characters – particularly if you think globally.Īt the other end of the spectrum is the “Unicode” encoding, which uses two (or more) bytes, giving many more possible different characters. The most common true 8-bit encoding used on the internet today is “ ISO-8859-1”.) (Technically ASCII actually only usesħ bits of that byte, or values from 0-127. The “ASCII” character set or encoding uses a single byte – values from 0 to 255 – to represent up to 256 different characters.
The fundamental concept is that all characters are actually stored as numbers.
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