Hacker News Reader

I think I'll hold out for the ... simple way. There should be more than one way to do it, right?

Indeed... Simple, and probably wrong.

I won't pretend that Perl's unicode support sucks; Working with Unicode in Perl is far more complicated than it ought to be and rife with bugs and corner-cases. However, working with Unicode properly in just about any language requires a whole lot of careful thought and consideration.

Maybe Java (and by extension JVM languages) is the best you can get right now, I dunno...

whoops, I meant that it does suck, and I won't pretend otherwise.

The simple way is ignore everything after the first point 7. Your code WILL be broken but so is everyone else's code. 99% of programmers don't know much about encodings I don't expect them to start learning about the issues with unicode's normalization and collation algorithms.

On most of those issues being the only one that gets it right is either pointless or retroactively wrong.

My approach so far is to deliberately use ASCII. Since my code does not have to operate in i18n (and I don't anticipate that it will), ASCII is the YAGNI solution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com