Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Know your character sets' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Know your character sets
Authored by: chepner on Apr 17, '06 08:42:12AM

This is where it is helpful to know what character set you (and your applications) are using. "High ASCII" generally refers to any encoding that uses values greater than 127 (requiring the 8th or "high" bit to be set) to represent characters. There are several different character sets--such as MacRoman, Latin-1 (ISO 8859), Unicode, Windows Code Page 1252, etc.--that assign different characters to the same value. Further, there are serveral multibyte encoding schemes for Unicode, so what is intended as a single character in Unicode may be interpreted as 2, 3, or even 4 different characters in Latin-1.

I don't know enough about the internals of the clipboard and drag-and-drop to know what the exact issue here is. Perhaps the clipboard silently assumes all text copied into it is in one particular character set, regardless of the source, whereas drag-and-drop-ed text carries information about the source encoding with it.



[ Reply to This | # ]