Preface
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
—Hamlet, Act I, scene V
This book is based on long-term experience with troubleshooting encoding problems, especially at SAS Institute Inc.
However, my actual first encounter with encodings was while working as a consultant for information retrieval systems at the German chemical company BASF. One of my jobs at that time was to administer a mainframe-based information retrieval system, customize it for the German language, and document the modifications for internal customers. At that time I wondered why German characters such as ä and ü displayed ...
