What is a character? What does "the length of a string" mean? How can I combine different scripts in one text?

In the days of ASCII, the answers to these questions were plain and simple. However, as the need to support languages and scripts from around the world became increasingly important, the ASCII-oriented mindset must be forgotten. Together, we will follow the path towards the Unicode standard by discussing abstract concepts related to text processing. Then, we will get our hands dirty with code samples to experiment with Unicode-related features.

After the presentation, you will have a good understanding of what Unicode is, what problems it solves, how to work with different UTF encodings, and how to process text in a safe, reliable, and correct way.