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Garbled Text in Bad Places — 8 Comments

  1. So…
    Let us say, hypothetically of course, that I know of a cousin of a cousin of mine who finds this 文字化け thing far too often… do you mean to imply that this person is living in the past, then?

    Anyway, at least now that I know the name of the problem I might actually be able to google for a solution :p.

    • Haha, hypothetically your cousin’s cousin might just have an older computer with older settings.

  2. 文字化けね。。。

    ソフト・テスターとして、これをテストしたり、バッグを書いたりする必要だった。文字化けって言うのは知りなかった。

    仕事でこの言葉をよく使う。どうも。

  3. If anybody’s curious for a more technical explanation of how 文字化け came to be they should give http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html a read. It’s not really specific to Japanese but it does cover how different text formats were handled in the early days of computing and the trouble it caused when the Internet became a thing. It’s especially fascinating reading if you’re into both Japanese and programming.

    • Great read (one irony of being a pure mathematician is knowing full well how this stuff ought to work in general abstract terms while neglecting the practice).
      The sense of humor is pretty great too.

      Anyway, the following quote from your link
      “Anyway, what does the poor reader of this website, which was written in Bulgarian but appears to be Korean (and not even cohesive Korean), do? He uses the View | Encoding menu and tries a bunch of different encodings (there are at least a dozen for Eastern European languages) until the picture comes in clearer. If he knew to do that, which most people don’t.”
      actually solved the problem I ha… I mean, the problem the hypothetical cousin of my cousin had, so now I’m feeling pretty good about giving that thing a read.

    • In fact even that information is out of date now, the latest UTF-8 revision only allows up to 4 bytes to encode a code point, not 6 bytes as stated in that article (which seems like a step backwards, but it’s for compatibility reasons as UTF-16 can only use to up 4 bytes).

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