Posts

Showing posts from November, 2008

How do you say "Excuse Me" in Canadian?

As a follow up to my earlier post on secure coding, I just wanted to talk about another thing that has been giving me fits: Coding foreign language support. Normally this isn't something most people have to deal with, but a lot of the password lists I'm parsing and cracking are non-English. First some background. The standard default scheme to hold character information, (such as an 'a') is ASCII otherwise known as the "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" (might show up in a game of Trivial Pursuit). As you can tell from its name, ASCII wasn't designed to be able to represent non-English characters. In fact, it can only represent 128 different characters, including control characters (such as return, space, etc). To add support for multiple languages, (while being backward compatible with ASCII), another standard was developed. It's called UTF-8, otherwise known as Unicode Transformation Format, (You'll never need to know the full n