Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by PowerBar 1918 days ago
I'm guessing the system was built to handle extended (8-bit) ascii, which contains the accented French characters. Upgrading a system of this size (and potentially many other systems it needs to trade information with) to support UTF-8 would be a very large undertaking.

It should have been built to support UTF-8 in the first place and should be upgraded, but the time it will take to do that will not help this person. With any luck, it may help someone else in the future though.