Should source code be saved in UTF-8 format

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What is your goal? Balance your needs against the pros and cons of this choice.

UTF-8 Pros

  • allows use of all character literals without \uHHHH escaping

UTF-8 Cons

  • using non-ASCII character literals without \uHHHH increases risk of character corruption
    • font and keyboard issues can arise
    • need to document and enforce use of UTF-8 in all tools (editors, compilers build scripts, diff tools)
  • beware the byte order mark

ASCII Pros

  • character/byte mappings are shared by a wide range of encodings
    • makes source files very portable
    • often obviates the need for specifying encoding meta-data (since the files would be identical if they were re-encoded as UTF-8, Windows-1252, ISO 8859-1 and most things short of UTF-16 and/or EBCDIC)

ASCII Cons

  • limited character set
  • this isn’t the 1960s

Note: ASCII is 7-bit, not “extended” and not to be confused with Windows-1252, ISO 8859-1, or anything else.

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