Utf-8 or iso

See How many characters can UTF-8 encode? ASCII: 7 bits. ISO 8 bits. UTF bits bytes. Damian Vogel 1 1 gold badge 11 11 silver badges 16 16 bronze badges. Cyker Cyker 8, 7 7 gold badges 56 56 silver badges 81 81 bronze badges. Shital Shah Shital Shah 53k 12 12 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. I had seen where Umlaut's are not supposedly converted with UTF8.

We saw examples of this and in searching we found the ISO and it seems to work. We have a lot of German Scientist we work with. Umlaut's are represented as two characters in utf8.

They convert fine and work well. The problem comes from programs that expect 1 byte per character. For these legacy programs, ISO has 1-byte umlaut's. Just as an example of where single byte encoding is preferred, SMS messages have a limit of bytes and primarily use single-byte encoding.

If you were a business that sends automated SMS messages, you don't want to double your cost just to not use a legacy standard. Chris Morgan Chris Morgan Alan Jurgensen Alan Jurgensen 9 9 silver badges 20 20 bronze badges. Helpful, but I think you meant instead of in extended-ascii ? Any Latin-n or ison character above will not be translated to a single byte utf-8 character. However, for values , they will translate exactly.

This answer is a bit confusing in its use of the term "extended ascii", which just is a term to refer to any character encoding that is not ASCII. But, non-ascii latin-1 characters ie. In UTF-8 2 byte encodings begin at The Overflow Blog.

Stack Gives Back Safety in numbers: crowdsourcing data on nefarious IP addresses. Thanks, Laura. Yes that article from Joel is very good indeed. Go for Unicode always is what I say. The problems are basically the same for all encodings. Everything is fine as long as everyone uses the same encoding, no matter what it is. The problem with all encodings that are not Unicode is that for a lot of people it is impossible to use the same encoding.

Unicode is the only one encoding that everyone can use. Even Klingons! Your email address will not be published. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Note that when using xxd , the hexadecimal presentation is shown. If not given, it defaults to a platform dependent value. According to bultins. This should only be used in text mode. The default encoding is platform dependent, but any encoding supported by Python can be passed.

See the codecs module for the list of supported encodings. I often use the utility methods available in class java. For example, reading all lines from a txt file txt can be done as follows.

Read content as bytes is possible, too. In this case, we read the file without precising the encoding. Then, you can chose the charset when converting byte array to string, as mentioned in the previous section. Hope you enjoy this article, see you the next time!