Re: My mp3 tagging code can't handle Unicode tags

Peter, Louis,

when using a programming language that supports Unicode strings (like 
Java or .NET), you can simply determine whether any given string can be 
encoded with ISO-8859-1 or not as follows (pseudo code):

bool canBeISOEncoded(String s)
{
   for (int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++)
   {
     if (s.charAt(i) > 0xFF)
       return (false);
   }
   return (true);
}

The simple trick is to just check if the Unicode string contains any 
characters with a value of > U+FF (decimal 255). If yes, you need to 
encode the String as Unicode. If not, the chars fit into ISO-8859-1.

If you need to go for Unicode, common encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 or 
UTF-32. Each encoding has advantages and disadvantages. Regarding ID3 
tags, you should use UTF-16 and ID3 version 2.3 tags in order to 
maximize compatibility with other implementations.

Hope this helps.

Kind regards,
Mathias Kunter
Developer of Magic MP3 Tagger