 PHP has almost <a href="http://ca3.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php">complete ignorance of character encoding issues</a>, blithely using 8 bits for characters, making it darn near impossible to develop good international web applications, I thought, <em>enough is enough</em>.</p>

<p>So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don't know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I <em>catch</em> you, I'm going to punish you by 