Encoding

Home & Living 6 min Japan's new kanji forms coincide with the mainland's in about a third of pairs Japan fixed simpler print forms for its everyday kanji in 1949, and the 2010 Jōyō list still prints an old Kan... EV Eva Chin 15 Oct Home & Living 6 min Mainland and Taiwan telegraph codebooks nearly always give a Hong Kong ID card character the same code below 8000 The four-digit groups under a Chinese name on a Hong Kong identity card are telegraph codes, which the Immigra... EV Eva Chin 15 Oct Developer Tools 6 min A Korean learner's dictionary needs only 1,465 of Hangul's syllables Unicode encodes 11,172 Hangul syllables by one formula, and South Korea's 1987 character standard kept 2,350 o... KE Kenji Tanaka 3 Oct Developer Tools 6 min The same Shift_JIS bytes read as 髙 or 騠, depending on the table Browsers and Microsoft's CP932 table read Shift_JIS the same way, but other converters do not. We decoded all... MA Maya Lin 3 Oct Developer Tools 6 min Neither Chinese punctuation standard requires full-width marks Mainland China's punctuation standard and Taiwan's handbook measure marks in character cells and never require... MA Maya Lin 3 Oct Developer Tools 10 min What a seal script converter can and cannot do Seal script got its own Unicode block on 16 September 2026 — 11,328 characters — and a converter will still le... KE Kenji Tanaka 25 Sep Developer Tools 5 min Why common Cantonese characters like 嘅 and 咗 could not be typed in Big5 Eleven of the most-used written Cantonese characters, including 嘅, 咗 and 喺, could not be typed in Big5, the... KE Kenji Tanaka 22 Sep Chinese Culture 6 min How China, Taiwan and Unicode each choose between 峰 and 峯 峰 and 峯 are one word with one sound. Whether they count as one character depends on who is asking. Here is h... EV Eva Chin 21 Sep Developer Tools 7 min Why a Chinese character that works in GBK can break in Big5 GB2312, GBK and Big5 write the same Chinese character with different bytes, and none of them can write every c... KE Kenji Tanaka 21 Sep Cybersecurity 5 min Sixteen different base64 strings decode to the same byte Base64 leaves four bits free when it encodes a single byte, and RFC 4648 binds encoders with MUST while granti... KE Kenji Tanaka 12 Sep Developer Tools 8 min Z and +00:00 stopped being the same thing in 2024 RFC 9557 moved Z across to mean the instant is known and the local offset is not, while +00:00 kept its older... KE Kenji Tanaka 12 Sep Developer Tools 5 min Valid JSON is not one thing, and three runtimes prove it A fourteen-byte document containing a lone surrogate escape parses in Node, parses in Python and is refused by... KE Kenji Tanaka 12 Sep Chinese Culture 10 min 花 has seven strokes, and eight, and ten Count it on the mainland and you get seven. Taiwan's education ministry says eight. A 五格 name reading says t... EV Eva Chin 2 Sep Cybersecurity 7 min The lookalike domain that is blocked on .com and shown on .ru The famous all-Cyrillic apple.com impersonation was patched in 2017 and the matter filed as closed. Both major... KE Kenji Tanaka 1 Sep Chinese Culture 6 min Most 火星文 converters are running the same copied file Feed the same characters to several Martian-text converters and most agree exactly. That looks like a standard... EV Eva Chin 1 Sep Chinese Culture 6 min Why a converter turns a toast into an obscenity 干杯 converts to 乾杯 correctly. Insert one character and 干了一杯 comes back 幹了一杯, which reads as an obsc... EV Eva Chin 1 Sep Chinese Culture 9 min Most advice on writing Chinese dates quotes a standard that was replaced in 2011 The rules for numbers and dates in Chinese publications were revised in 2011. A great deal of guidance, includ... EV Eva Chin 1 Sep Chinese Culture 5 min What happens to Chinese punctuation when text runs vertically Turning Chinese sideways does not turn its punctuation sideways. Quotation marks become different characters e... EV Eva Chin 31 Aug ASEAN Tech 5 min The Chinese characters a bank computer cannot store A rare character in a legal name fails in four different ways that look identical from the counter. One of the... SA Sarah Chew 31 Aug Developer Tools 5 min Why fancy text breaks search and screen readers The bold and script letters people put in bios are not a font. They are mathematical notation, and the standar... KE Kenji Tanaka 31 Aug Chinese Culture 5 min The h in Cantonese Yale is not a sound At the start of a syllable the h is the consonant you expect. At the end it is silent — it marks the tone. Beg... EV Eva Chin 31 Aug ASEAN Tech 6 min Why Some Languages Come Out as Empty Boxes A page can be perfectly translated and still arrive as hollow rectangles, because rendering needs a font that... SA Sarah Chew 21 Aug ASEAN Tech 5 min Why Your Name Does Not Fit in the Box A form field capped at forty characters gives an English speaker forty and a Khmer speaker twenty-one, because... DA Daniel Koh 21 Aug ASEAN Tech 6 min What the Same Sentence Costs in Eleven Languages Write a prompt in Thai and it costs more than the same prompt in English — not because the model charges you d... SA Sarah Chew 21 Aug