* Vuillemot, Ward W wrote:
>UNICODE is a character encoding
Not really. Commonly a character encoding is some mapping between
characters and bytes, while Unicode is a mapping between numbers
(code points) and characters.
>When I output to the web I will need to convert UNICODE to some
>appropriate character-set based upon the language selection.
The term "charset" or "character set" is considered harmful and
shouldn't be used, please see
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/charset-harmful for the details.
If you want to store you characters you must translate them to bytes
or sequences of bytes, since this is the storage unit of most computers.
>[...] can I just avoid it and send the UNICODE data directly to a
>web-browser and let the browser do whatever is necessary.
Not possible, since the browser retrieves a stream of bytes and must
re-translate those bytes into characters in order to parse the data.
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