Binary strings, unicode and encodings

[Peter Hansen]

Laurent Therond wrote:
> 
> I forgot to ask something else...
> 
> If a client and a server run on locales/platforms that use different
> encodings, they are bound to wrongly interpret string bytes. Correct?

Since the byte strings are by definition *encoded* forms of the Unicode
data, they definitely need to have a shared frame of reference or they
will misinterpret the data, as you surmise.  You can't decode something
if you don't know how it was encoded.

-Peter