How to test an application for correct encoding (e.g. UTF-8)

Question

Encoding issues are among the one topic that have bitten me most often during development. Every platform insists on its own encoding, most likely some non-UTF-8 defaults are in

Answer 1

Localization is pretty tough.

I think you are really asking two questions. One of them, how do you get everybody to correctly work on an i8n application, is not technical, but a project management issue in my opinion. If you want people to use a common standard, like UTF-8, then you will simply have to enforce that. Tools will help but people will first need to be told to do so.

Besides saying that UTF-8 is in my opinion the way to go, it is hard to give an answer to the questions about tools. It really depends on the kind of project you are doing. If it for example is a Java project that you are talking about then it is a simple matter of properly configuring the IDE to encode files in UTF-8. And to make sure your UTF-8 localizations are in external resource files.

One thing you can certainly do is to make unit tests that check compliance. If your localized messages/labels are in resource files then it is faily easy to check if they are properly UTF-8 encoded I think.