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I am a developer who is working with Chinese characters. I am trying to convert part of my project into English. I am currently rewriting the project's internationalization module.

I am unfamiliar with the standards for English, so I don't know if non-ascii is used widely? If it is: Tell me some characters they use frequently.

Bart
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pjincz
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  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bront%C3%AB_family, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/jalape%C3%B1o, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/frapp%C3%A9, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/r%C3%A9sum%C3%A9 – R. Martinho Fernandes Apr 19 '13 at 13:29
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    Use [UTF-8 everywhere](http://utf8everywhere.org/) and be done with it. – Matt Ball Apr 19 '13 at 13:30
  • They use only those characters they can type with standard american keyboard, and usually they can't imagine that something else could ever exist ;) – Danubian Sailor Apr 19 '13 at 13:35
  • I have also seen façade; people like such small ticks. And of course there are the comma quotes, British Pound sign and such. – Joop Eggen Apr 19 '13 at 13:35
  • [The Ten Commandments of Unicode](http://cafe.elharo.com/programming/the-ten-commandments-of-unicode/) – McDowell Apr 19 '13 at 13:38
  • @McDowell It's just a pity that while the advice is nice, the post manages to get the terminology wrong ("UTF-16 code points") :( – R. Martinho Fernandes Apr 19 '13 at 14:48
  • @R.MartinhoFernandes Good point; I left a comment. – McDowell Apr 19 '13 at 15:37

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Standard English spelling uses en dash (–), curly quotation marks (“, ”, ‘, ’); American English also uses em dash (—). Depending on conventions and preferences, several non-Ascii letters may be used, too, especially in words of French or Latin origin, such as é, ë, ç, and æ. Moreover, even in nonspecialized texts, various special character such as superscript two (²), micro sign (µ), and degree sign (°) may be seen.

Jukka K. Korpela
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