Anything wrong with using windows-1252 instead of UTF-8

Question

I have a test site that has been using windows-1252 all along. They do need/use some symbols like the square root symbol. And they have no need to display in another langu

Answer 1

You claim that Windows-1252 offers everything you need but the √ symbol is a counter-example. You must be using one of these tricks:

• HTML entities: √, √ or similar
• Print another character and change the font

In either case, your solution is not portable: stuff will only display correctly in a properly configured web browser. Everything else (database, JavaScript, text files, plain text e-mail messages...) will not contain the real data.

Additionally, JSON's only encoding is UTF-8. JavaScript will normally make the conversions for you but you must ensure that all your tool-chain behaves similarly.

So to answer your main question: there's nothing wrong in using Windows-1252 if that's all you need. The problem is that you already need more than it can offer.

As about your problems with UTF-8, it's obvious that UTF-8 is a full Unicode encoding so it does meet all the requirements. (Not being able to make it work can your reason to dump it but it isn't a technical reason.) My guess is that, since your current data doesn't have actual square root symbols, switching encodings breaks the trick you were using. You need to:

1. Find out what current data looks like
2. Run a one-time search and replace