In 2004 a woman from Russia and a woman from France were emailing each other about Harry Potter books. The recent Harry Potter book was available in France, but not available in Russia. The Russian woman sent an email to the french woman asking her to send a copy of Harry Potter in the mail. The email included her address, which was not written in English (the language the rest of the emails were written in). The address was in Russian, and used Russian letters, encoded in character encoding named `KOI8-R`. The French woman's email client did not have the same character encoding (it was using `ISO-8859-1`), so the french woman received an email asking her to carefully write down an address that was mis-encoded. o ![[Pasted image 20260126101431.png]] The postal service workers in Russia are apparently adept at handling situations like this, and were able to successfully translate the character encoding and deliver the book. This is a story about how important [[Unicode]] is to the world. **** # More ## Source - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd5uJ7Nlvvo&pp=2AbIGtIHCQmHCgGHKiGM7w%3D%3D - https://unicodebook.readthedocs.io/definitions.html#mojibake