My last blog entry was about the character encoding problems I had with Klatschbase. Of course, there has to be a follow-up, since encoding problems are so ubiquitous. I did a change to hunchentoot’s basic authorization method to allow utf-8 login name and password. As Edi Weitz pointed out in the hunchentoot mailinglist, this change is not standard compliant. Thinking about it, my assumptions were quite stupid. Why should the header, that is sent by the client, care about the standard encoding of the server.

Character encoding really is a never ending story. I am a huge fan of Unicode and UTF-8. But it is still not the default everywhere. This blog entry is about the problems I encountered while making Klatschbase working correctly with UTF-8. First of all, SBCL - my common lisp implementation of choice - supports UTF-8 out of the box. So, no problem here. Hunchentoot, Edi Weitz’s wonderful http server, supports UTF-8, but per default uses ISO-8859-1.