So here I am, I read about encoding all day, now I need some clarification.
First off I'm using eclipse mars with pydev.
Unicode is a (character set + code points), basicaly a table of symbols associated with numerical value. The way those value are going to be stored at a binary level are defined by the encoding, let's say UTF-8.
1 : shebang
What is the shebang for? when I put # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
does it do something? or does it just indicate that my file is encoded in UTF-8 (but since it's just an indication it could be a lie :o)
2 : Eclipse file encoding
After I wrote my shebang and saved I went into the property of the file, and it said encoding : ISO-8859-1, so my guess is that the shebang does nothing beside indicate in which encoding my file is. Do I need to manually set every files to UTF-8 or is there a way to teach eclipse to read the shebang and act accordingly.
3 : Why does the shebang only specify the encoding?
My shebang say utf-8, ok right, so what? it does not tell me which caracter set is used. Since UTF-8 is just an encoding I could use UTF-8 with any character set no? I could encode ASCII in UTF-8 if I wanted, since an encoding is just a way to convert and store/read code points. What if my character set encoded in utf-8 does not have the same code points than unicode? (is this possible?)
4 : maybe a solution?
I oftenly read that utf-8 is an implementation of unicode, does that mean that each times you read encoding = UTF-8 you can be 100%, and I say 100%, sure that the characterset+code points is unicode?
I'm lost