Dr. International

Use Unicode!

September 12, 2023 Sep 12, 2023 09/12/23

Shawn Steele

Recently there were some updates that changed the behavior of a national encoding standard, changing the behavior when mapping to and from Unicode.  Those kinds of changes lead to data corruption.  I figured I'd take this opportunity to remind folks of the benefits of "using Unicode!" Unicode Benefits All modern operating systems are ...

Using Custom Culture to Set Euro for Croatia

January 3, 2023 Jan 3, 2023 01/3/23

Shawn Steele

Croatia has adopted the Euro.  There are a couple of ways to update Windows to use the Euro symbol or currency for Croatian locales. If Croatian is the current user default locale, then the simplest is to change the desired currency symbol and number formats in the Region control panel (intl.cpl).  Note that this only works for ...

Culture data shouldn’t be considered stable

April 12, 2021 Apr 12, 2021 04/12/21

Shawn Steele

Realizing that people's preferences change and that those preferences impact data output and consumed by computers. By remembering the context of an operation we can avoid corruption and confusion of our data. Understanding when data is intended for human readability or consumption by another machine avoids problems with data confusion.

Welcome to “Dr. International”

April 1, 2021 Apr 1, 2021 04/1/21

Shawn Steele

Hi!  We've created this space to share some thoughts about software internationalization. Internationalization is a really long word, so we've truncated the URL to just "i18n".  There are 18 letters between the "i" and the "n" in "internationalization", so i18n is a bit of a shortcut.  (Another common abbreviation in this space is l10n ...