>If you have a string, in memory, in a file, or in an email message, you have to know what encoding it is in or you cannot interpret it or display it to users correctly.</p>

<p>Almost every stupid "my website looks like gibberish" or "she can't read my emails when I use accents" problem comes down to one naive programmer who didn't understand the simple fact that if you don't tell me whether a particular string is encoded using UTF-8 or ASCII or ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1) or Windows 1252 (Western European), yo