On the ultimate encoding
You would think that anyone doing business in Québec would have been bitten often enough by string encoding problems that by now, they would have standardized their pipeline on UTF-8. You would be wrong.
Seen at Canadian Tire.
If you write code, you should know that encoding must be explicit. You can't dodge this question. I would understand if you didn't want to specify the encodings all over the place. That's why as soon as a string falls under your control, you should convert it to UTF-8 and use only that internally. Go and sin no more.