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Western European? I don't know - there are many languages in that part of the world which use some non-standard characters. Germany (not sure if it's still the case), France, Austria, Italy, Spain... Anyway, I always thought UNICODE ignorance is strictly an anglo-sphere thing - most of the rest of the world is very aware.

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Western Europe uses more characters than ASCII like umlauts (äöü), accents (àèé), €¢, German ß and a few more, but large parts are still comfortably stuck in a codepage-style mindset thinking "ISO Latin-1 is good enough". (Also know as or confused with ISO/IEC 8859-1, CP-1252 or "Ansi".)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page#ISO.2FIEC_8859-relat...

Central European languages can get more or less by with Latin-1, although even there many characters are already missing, iirc French, Czech, Dutch and Finnish. Special characters of many regional dialects are missing as well.

FWIW (more or less proper) Unicode support seems to be pretty much an implicit, hard requirement today for almost anything facing users.

Many government databases still just use some codepage and won't be changing anytime soon though. You can't get your name in a Swiss passport without first changing it into something ISO 8859-15 can represent.

http://www.24heures.ch/suisse/Les-noms-de-l-Est-mutiles-lors...

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