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 catch you, I'm going to punish you by making you peel onions
for 6 months in a submarine. I swear I will.

Joel Spolsky
"The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely,
Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)"