PUBLIC MARKS with tags encoding & character

Convert Chinese characters to Unicode

I use this text editor for viewing text files in any character encoding. It's great for converting from one encoding to another (with "Save As") or for verifying the character encoding of the data in a text file.

UTF-8 Sampler - Great place to cut-and-paste sample character strings from many different languages.

Tutorials and online resources for character encoding issues -- essential for anyone working with Unicode, utf-8, Japanese, Chinese, or other international character encodings.

This page is going to assume you’ve done a little reading and absorbed some paranioa about the issue of character sets and character encoding in web applications. If you haven’t, try here; “When I discovered that the popular web development tool PHP has almost complete ignorance of character encoding issues, blithely using 8 bits for characters, making it darn near impossible to develop good international web applications, I thought, enough is enough.” “Darn near impossible” is perhaps too extreme but, certainly in PHP, if you simply “accept the defaults” you probably will end up with all kinds of strange characters and question marks the moment anyone outside the US or Western Europe submits some content to your site This page won’t rehash existing discussions suffice to say you should be thinking in terms of Unicode, the grand unified solution to all character issues and, in particular, UTF-8, a specific encoding of Unicode and the best solution for PHP applications.