Character Encoding and the Internet

My partner ran into a character encoding issue at work recently that we were talking about over dinner (you all talk about things like character encoding at dinner too, right?), and I realized I knew less about it than I wanted to. And as usual, one of my favorite ways to learn something new is to write a blog post about it, so here we are!

High level, we know that all data transferred over the internet in packets made up of bytes — so when it comes to character encoding, the question becomes: how do all the characters that our users enter into forms, or that we pull…