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Comment by zzo38computer | Hacker News Reader

My own programs are specifically designed to not use Unicode. I think that Unicode is really messy and I dislike it. If you want to display Japanese text, EUC-JP can be used.

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I really hope you're being sarcastic

I am not sarcastic. I don't like Unicode.

If you like, to stick just to Japanese, this:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/JIS_and_...

better than unicode, you can't be helped.

Not that I like unicode much either -- amongst other things the idiotic arrangement of codepoints makes it basically impossible to do remotely efficient text processing; e.g. here's a graph of the automaton the RE2 uses to check if something is an uppercase character:

https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/cat_Lu.png

(For ascii there would exactly be a single arrow connecting two nodes).

And here I was thinking that "Unix variants history" or "Linux audio systems" graphs were messy and complicated...

This is about display, not encoding. Using EUC-JP to store text doesn't guarantee that it will be rendered with a Japanese font.

In practice it does, if it will be rendered at all. Elsewhere on this very page you can find people suggesting storing the display locale alongside the unicode string, which is really the only way to solve this problem in the general case - but in that case you might as well store pairs of byte sequence and encoding, there's not much difference between that and unicode string and locale.

Aren't the modern text display APIs of the most popular OSes all Unicode-based now? It seems likely that they will convert to Unicode when told to display a string in a different codepage and replace the locale info with the default Unicode behavior (of basing it on the user locale)

> In practice it does, if it will be rendered at all.

Seems like you're right, at least as far as Firefox is concerned. Testing the data links below, it appears to guess the default language based on the encoding used. Neat!

data:text/html;charset=euc-jp;base64,PHA+RGVmYXVsdDogv8/EvrOks9G5/Mb+PC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9ImphIj5sYW5nPSJqYSIgv8/EvrOks9G5/Mb+PC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9ImtvIj5sYW5nPSJrbyIgv8/EvrOks9G5/Mb+PC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9InpoLWNuIj5sYW5nPSJ6aC1jbiIgv8/EvrOks9G5/Mb+PC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9InpoLWhrIj5sYW5nPSJ6aC1oayIgv8/EvrOks9G5/Mb+PC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9InpoLXR3Ij5sYW5nPSJ6aC10dyIgv8/EvrOks9G5/Mb+PC9wPgoK

data:text/html;charset=euc-kr;base64,PHA+RGVmYXVsdDog7NPywfqtysfN6ez9PC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9ImphIj5sYW5nPSJqYSIg7NPywfqtysfN6ez9PC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9ImtvIj5sYW5nPSJrbyIg7NPywfqtysfN6ez9PC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9InpoLWNuIj5sYW5nPSJ6aC1jbiIg7NPywfqtysfN6ez9PC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9InpoLWhrIj5sYW5nPSJ6aC1oayIg7NPywfqtysfN6ez9PC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9InpoLXR3Ij5sYW5nPSJ6aC10dyIg7NPywfqtysfN6ez9PC9wPgoK

data:text/html;charset=gb2312;base64,PHA+RGVmYXVsdDogyNDWsbqjvce5x8jrPC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9ImphIj5sYW5nPSJqYSIgyNDWsbqjvce5x8jrPC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9ImtvIj5sYW5nPSJrbyIgyNDWsbqjvce5x8jrPC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9InpoLWNuIj5sYW5nPSJ6aC1jbiIgyNDWsbqjvce5x8jrPC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9InpoLWhrIj5sYW5nPSJ6aC1oayIgyNDWsbqjvce5x8jrPC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9InpoLXR3Ij5sYW5nPSJ6aC10dyIgyNDWsbqjvce5x8jrPC9wPgoK

data:text/html;charset=big5;base64,PHA+RGVmYXVsdDogpGKqva78qKSwqaRKPC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9ImphIj5sYW5nPSJqYSIgpGKqva78qKSwqaRKPC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9ImtvIj5sYW5nPSJrbyIgpGKqva78qKSwqaRKPC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9InpoLWNuIj5sYW5nPSJ6aC1jbiIgpGKqva78qKSwqaRKPC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9InpoLWhrIj5sYW5nPSJ6aC1oayIgpGKqva78qKSwqaRKPC9wPjxwIGxhbmc9InpoLXR3Ij5sYW5nPSJ6aC10dyIgpGKqva78qKSwqaRKPC9wPgoK

And what if you want to display Japanese and Korean at the same time?

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