Character Sets

And now the exciting world of character sets.

I've been having a bit of bother lately exchanging encoded strings between web services

<kang>We are merely exchanging long protein strings. If you can think of a simpler way, I'd like to hear it</kang>

Anyway I eventually got to the bottom of it after reading this article by Joel Spolsky.

If you are a developer, I urge you to read it.