Today, working with heterogeneous systems is a must and yet too many developers have forgotten more (or more honestly never knew) about Unicode, Characters Sets and encoding than is safe/recommended/sensible.
To that end I’d wanted to write an article on the subject but found one that does it better that i ever could.
***This is a highly recommended read for any/every developer***.
[www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html](www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html)