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this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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Text encoding 'standards' were clearly the devil’s work, handed down to humanity to sow chaos and suffering.
In my experience things are fine while you work in a single environment, or you have control over the entire pipeline of data. Things quickly turn into a story from the Bible when different systems start trying to communicate.
That's true yeah. The seed of all the problems is assuming.
My teammates assumed System.DefaultEncoding must be some default value (UTF-8, they assumed, again) that would carry across all servers so no worries. Except no, it's "whatever encoding is configured on this machine as the default code page".
Which was the same across our networks, lucky them.
But for this one machine setup by an external contractor who had UTF-8 as default.
That one took me a while to track down...