"Unprintable" 8-bit characters

[Daniel Staal]

--As of November 8, 2011 7:58:04 PM -0600, Conrad J. Sabatier is alleged to 
have said:

> So, what would be the safest bet as far as the most "universal"
> representation for these characters?  Something I've long wondered
> about when I've e-mailed people and copied/pasted these characters (are
> they really seeing what I'm seeing?).  :-)

--As for the rest, it is mine.

These days, the safest bet is UTF-8, or some other Unicode character set, 
in something that can convey what character set it is in.  (Email can, 
depending on the mail client.)

Not that Unicode is universal yet, but it designed to be (and is, 
generally) a solution to the 'multiple character encodings' problem.  (By, 
of course, defining a new encoding.)  It has a decent amount of traction, 
and in a decade or so - once other options have been firmly depreciated - 
I'd expect we could start discussing whether to switch ls to using it by 
default.  ;)

All this is of course if you *must* go beyond 7-bit ASCII.  (Which all 
forms of Unicode is designed to be a strict superset of.)

Daniel T. Staal

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