J. Pablo FernÃ¡ndez

March 7, 2012

Pablo Fernandez

ASCII, charsets, encoding, encodings, L5, Latin-1, Unicode, UTF-8

“J. Pablo FernÃ¡ndez” is not my name, my name is J. Pablo Fernández, but I see the former quite often. For example, as a donor for the L5 series:

That happens when someone takes the UTF-8 encoded version of my name and re-interprets it as Latin-1 or ASCII. Something that sadly happens very often. Programmers of the world, I know thinking about character sets and encodings make your brain hurt and that’s why you pick UTF-8 and forget about it. But otherwise, if you are handling data, you are using a character set and an encoding. You have to know and understand that. A great place to start is Joel Spolsky’s The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).

Oh… the first episode of L5 was awesome, go and grab it. I can’t wait for the next one.

2 responses to “J. Pablo FernÃ¡ndez”

Rory Parle

2012-03-07

On my iPhone the name you claim is incorrect looks correct (featuring an a with an accent) but the one you say is correct shows up with a missing character glyph.

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1. Pablo
  
  2012-03-07
  
  Thank you Rory… I should have checked the post after publishing, somehow, it got fixed down the pipeline when I wanted broken characters. Now it’s correct.
  
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