I had the same problem with PuTTY and Windows 8 when connecting to tmux running on a Debian Squeeze machine. Even when setting the charset to UTF-8 in PuTTY (in the settings under Window > Translation > Remote character set) I didn’t get the correct line drawing. Setting the Remote character set to “Use font … Read more
Regarding this part: When I convert it to UTF-8 without bom and close file, the file is again ANSI when I reopen. The easiest solution is to avoid the problem entirely by properly configuring Notepad++. Try Settings -> Preferences -> New document -> Encoding -> choose UTF-8 without BOM, and check Apply to opened ANSI … Read more
When Windows NT was designed UTF-16 didn’t exist (NT 3.51 was born in 1993, while UTF-16 was born in 1996 with the Unicode 2.0 standard); there was instead UCS-2, which, at that time, was enough to hold every character available in Unicode, so the 1 code point = 1 code unit equivalence was actually true … Read more
The maximum number of bytes per character is 4 according to RFC3629 which limited the character table to U+10FFFF: In UTF-8, characters from the U+0000..U+10FFFF range (the UTF-16 accessible range) are encoded using sequences of 1 to 4 octets. (The original specification allowed for up to six byte character codes for code points past U+10FFFF.) … Read more
@dkarp gives an excellent general answer. I will add some additional specifics regarding Chinese: There are several countries where Chinese is the main written language. The major difference between them is whether they use simplified or traditional characters, but there are also minor regional differences (in vocabulary, etc). The standard way to distinguish these would … Read more
UTF-8 does not use one byte all the time, it’s 1 to 4 bytes. The first 128 characters (US-ASCII) need one byte. The next 1,920 characters need two bytes to encode. This covers the remainder of almost all Latin alphabets, and also Greek, Cyrillic, Coptic, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac and Tāna alphabets, as well as … Read more
UTF-8 is a multibyte encoding that can represent any Unicode character. ISO 8859-1 is a single-byte encoding that can represent the first 256 Unicode characters. Both encode ASCII exactly the same way.