webmaster1 Posted January 16, 2010 Share Posted January 16, 2010 My site/forum will be in English only. In my research, I've encountered UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1. I can't seem to find a straight answer as to which one is better practice to use. I already know it depends on my content. It's just a regular site with an SMF forum so I can't think of anything to discern between the two. Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/188648-what-charset-should-i-use-for-my-site-and-smf/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
webmaster1 Posted January 16, 2010 Author Share Posted January 16, 2010 Am I right to assume that it's simply a matter of the languages my site will be using, in which case UTF-8 is not required since my site will only be in English? Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/188648-what-charset-should-i-use-for-my-site-and-smf/#findComment-995921 Share on other sites More sharing options...
thehippy Posted January 17, 2010 Share Posted January 17, 2010 ISO-8859-1 has a few advantages over UTF-8 Its been a standard since the 80s and in use just as long Its easier to process (single byte encoding vs UTF's multi-byte encoding), thus faster to compare and store MySQL is far more optimized for ISO-8859-1 over UTF-8, this is getting better though UTF-8 has advantages of its own. Whether your site is English based or not unless you have some added input filtering for non-ISO-8859-1 characters, they will show up and be improperly rendered, hitting your page(s) with a fugly stick. UTF-8 has the Latin alphabet plus the variations of the latin alphabet. ISO-8859-1 is an incomplete set of the alphabet we use. An example, the Canadian English alphabet is not completely covered because of its connection with French. Formal/archaic Latin isn't completely covered either, which tends to show up in academic papers. If you decide in the future to add multilingual support, do you want to manage multiple character sets or just one? Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/188648-what-charset-should-i-use-for-my-site-and-smf/#findComment-996600 Share on other sites More sharing options...
webmaster1 Posted January 17, 2010 Author Share Posted January 17, 2010 Cheers for that. Based on your explanation and my needs, I'll opt for ISO. Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/188648-what-charset-should-i-use-for-my-site-and-smf/#findComment-996716 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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