Scott Hanselman

Computer things they didn't teach you in school #2 - Code Pages, Character Encoding, Unicode, UTF-8 and the BOM

November 15, 2019 Comment on this post [17] Posted in Musings
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OK, fine maybe they DID teach you this in class. But, you'd be surprised how many people think they know something but don't know the background or the etymology of a term. I find these things fascinating. In a world of bootcamp graduates, community college attendees (myself included!), and self-taught learners, I think it's fun to explore topics like the ones I plan to cover in my new YouTube Series "Computer things they didn't teach you."

BOOK RECOMMENDATION: I think of this series as being in the same vein as the wonderful "Imposter's Handbook" series from Rob Conery (I was also involved, somewhat). In Rob's excellent words: "Learn core CS concepts that are part of every CS degree by reading a book meant for humans. You already know how to code build things, but when it comes to conversations about Big-O notation, database normalization and binary tree traversal you grow silent. That used to happen to me and I decided to change it because I hated being left out. I studied for 3 years and wrote everything down and the result is this book."

In the first video I covered the concept of Carriage Returns and Line Feeds. But do you know WHY it's called a Carriage Return? What's a carriage? Where did it go? Where is it returning from? Who is feeding it lines?

In this second video I talk about Code Pages, Character Encoding, Unicode, UTF-8 and the BOM. I thought it went very well.

What would you like to hear about next?


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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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November 20, 2019 7:41
Oh boy, did this ever bring back some interesting old memories.

I was tasked to work on a text processing library. This library had to be able to take any random text file from anywhere on the internet, detect which encoding it used, convert it to Unicode, and normalize it (i.e. combine modifier characters where possible and put the rest in a known order). After all of this, the text could then be processed.

I had some knowledge of character encodings before this, but working on this library really opened my eyes. I didn't realise quite how many encodings there were out there, and how widely varied they can be. There's single byte encodings, multi-byte encodings, variable byte length encodings, surrogate characters... Never mind the encodings that are almost identical except for a couple of values (e.g. Windows code page 1252 vs ISO-8859-1).

I'm quite happy that the world is moving towards Unicode (UTF-8 and UTF-16) and getting away from the myriad of crazy encodings out there.
November 20, 2019 9:45
I really like this new series.
November 20, 2019 10:20
In the last example the lower bytes also get translated to their meaning like BEL,ACK,NAK and ESC
November 20, 2019 10:57
This new video tutorial series are very nice presented and the topics very interesting. Keep do them.
November 20, 2019 15:31
BOM is one of those pitfalls every junior dev I work with does not know how to handle. We get the occasional xml file from clients that contains a BOM.

Same goes for encoding issues. Depending on how people connect to their servers (putty with wrong encoding) and how server-side editors are configured (vi with wrong encoding) you might have to handle multiple layers of bad encoding.

These are the real trechnes I like to throw j.devs in.
November 20, 2019 16:30
Maybe a nice follow-up to this would be how this might apply to a real world scenario. As an example, how best to handle text which is copied from some unknown source and pasted into a web form and in the end stored in a SQL Database?

Another great video! Thank you!!
November 20, 2019 20:18
Thanks for this Scott, loving the series so far. I know a little bit about Encoding (mainly that it exists and there are many different types etc). However, the idea of a BOM is new to me and although it makes sense what I'm wondering is how do you know if the first few bytes of a file are a BOM or just part of the content?

Is the BOM always a specific length, does it always start with a certain piece of data?

Thanks,

Matt
November 20, 2019 22:28
Simply explains why C++ fell out o favor with the single byte to multbyte character mess in 2001.
C++
November 21, 2019 11:12
Hi,
This reminds me of an ancient (but awsome) post from joel spolsky which explains it a bit better for me.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/
November 21, 2019 11:22
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November 21, 2019 16:24
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November 25, 2019 14:45
However, the idea of a BOM is new to me and although it makes sense what I'm wondering is how do you know if the first few bytes of a file are a BOM or just part of the content?

Is the BOM always a specific length, does it always start with a certain piece of data?


The BOM is part of the content, and is always at the very start of the content. You only have to read the first few bytes to know if the BOM is present, and what encoding it indicates.

Scott mentioned UTF-8 encoding, but Unicode also defines some more standard encodings. One is UTF-16, which typically uses 2 bytes per code point but will sometimes use 4 bytes. Another is UTF-32, which always uses 4 bytes per code point. The order of these bytes can change depending on the CPU, which can be big-endian (BE, rare) or little-endian (LE, common, used by x86/x64).

Note that I'm saying "code point" rather than "character". This is because each Unicode value isn't necessarily a single character. Some values are modifiers, such as the accent mark above "a" in the letter "á". Some values aren't shown at all but have a special meaning, such as the zero width space and zero width joiner. "Code point" is the correct name that covers all of these values.

Anyway, back to the BOM. The value of the BOM is always the encoded representation of the code point U+FEFF. It comes out to the following values under the various Unicode encodings:


  • UTF-8 = EF BB BF
  • UTF-16-BE = FE FF
  • UTF-16-LE = FF FE
  • UTF-32-BE = 00 00 FE FF
  • UTF-32-LE = FF FE 00 00


This makes it really easy to identify one of the Unicode character encodings. You only need to read the first 4 bytes of the file, and if you find one of the patterns above, you know which encoding to use.

It's a lot better than the pre-Unicode days. There was no standard way to indicate which encoding was used, so you had to guess. It was very easy to guess the wrong encoding and you'd end up with gibberish.
November 26, 2019 2:32
There is a curated list of information that Every Programmer Should Know that may be useful for additional sessions.
November 26, 2019 15:04
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November 27, 2019 0:39
Refer: Unix file(1) command from 1973 to see the evolution/difficultly of determining content by file name, extension, and or leading bytes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_(command)
Rob
November 27, 2019 19:41
One standard I have to deal with is converting from EBCDIC to ASCII. This happens when dealing with sending and receiving files from the mainframe. I enjoyed this tutorial on the different encoding formats.

Also seems weird that when you write out binary you have to write it out backwards to get it to be read correctly forwards. Reading and writing binary might be a good topic to cover in a future video. Keep these videos coming.
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