Ansi... Unicode???

[LN7oGNh0]

I really dont understand these two things. (Im pretty new to Windows programming) Especially when using these with strings and characters. Can anyone explain why they are important to windows programming?

Thanks.

[freddie1]

This isn't something you can just 'blow off'. Sorry. With UNICODE there are over 64000 possible states in which a 16 bit quantity can take. Therefore, all the different alphabets of the world can be represented. An ansi 8 bit byte can only represent 255 possible states. Not enough.

I understand *nix uses a 32 bit character. There you've got over 4 billion possible states. Good idea though. As we move out into intersteller space, we'll need to be able to represent alien alphabets too! For example Romulan, Glingon, etc.

[LN7oGNh0]

Alright I understand now! Thank you.

[freddie1]

There's piles of info on this if you search. Its important, like I said. You can't do Windows GUI without understanding it. I've written up some brief info here that you should be able to get through in an hour or so ...

http://www.jose.it-berater.org/smfforum/index.php?topic=3389.0

[JockX]

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) :
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

What every programmer absolutely, positively needs to know about encodings and character sets to work with text:
http://kunststube.net/encoding/