On Friday, January 18, 2019 12:34:05 PM CET Rainer Hantsch wrote:
Hello, Josef.
The situation you describe lead me into using everywhere iso-8859-1/15. This incoding is closest to DOS codepage, a 1-Byte charset, and causing no troubles when interacting with microcontrollers (also usually only using 8-Bit charsets). For me "UTF8 everywhere" would be an odyssee. I would have to implement UTF8 into microcontrollers with a few k of ROM (a no-go), or everywhere implement a translation. It is lots easier to have everywhere 8859-1 in use.
But UTF-8 is compatible with ASCII as well. There should be no issues as long as you don’t do anything silly like adding a BOM to the start of each file. Also, implementing support for handling basic UTF-8 (as opposed to full Unicode support) is in fact trivial. Remember it was conceived in a time when what you describe as a microcontroller might well have been a PC.