Some interesting encoding/Unicode/text articles on kunststube and links for test files of various encodings

After yesterdays post on Testing and static methods don’t go well together, I read around on Source (kunststube [WayBack]) a bit more and found these very nice articles on encoding,Unicode and text:

• What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs to Know About Encodings and Character Sets to Work With Text [WayBack]
• The Great Escapism (or: What you Need to Know to Work With Text Within Text) [WayBack]
• Handling Unicode Front to Back in a Web App [WayBack]

Related on those, some other nice readings:

• Is there a set of “Lorem ipsums” files for testing character encoding issues? – Stack Overflow [WayBack]
• International Components for Unicode: ICU User Guide [WayBack]
  • International Components for Unicode ː Repository Browser: repos: icu/data/trunk/charset/data/ucm
• ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS [WayBack]

  • Notes on contents of the MAPPING directory:
    EASTASIA:
        This directory is obsolete.
    ETSI:
        ETSI GSM 03.38 7-bit default alphabet mapping.
    ISO8859:
        These are the mapping tables of the ISO 8859 series (1 - 16).
    OBSOLETE:
        Obsolete and unsupported mapping tables for historical
        and archival purposes only.
    VENDORS:
        Miscellaneous mapping tables for small codesets, typically provided
        by vendors. The majority of current, useful tables are here.

–jeroen