> If they are misinterpreted, it is because the character encoding is not declared properly.
OR because the software is buggy, or making assumptions about encoding and not checking them (which also counts as "buggy", of course). You can declare the encoding all you like, it won't protect you against the stupid decisions that other people make in writing their software. (See Excel, for example).
Yes, if you declare your encoding properly, things should work. Most of the time. And if you're using any encoding that is not the worldwide default (which these days is UTF-8), then you definitely should declare the encoding. But you'll still occasionally hit badly-written software that doesn't even think about other encodings and doesn't handle them properly. The only defense against that situation, where you declare your encoding properly and it still doesn't work, is to just use the encoding that the software was written to expect, which is almost certainly the worldwide default.
OR because the software is buggy, or making assumptions about encoding and not checking them (which also counts as "buggy", of course). You can declare the encoding all you like, it won't protect you against the stupid decisions that other people make in writing their software. (See Excel, for example).
Yes, if you declare your encoding properly, things should work. Most of the time. And if you're using any encoding that is not the worldwide default (which these days is UTF-8), then you definitely should declare the encoding. But you'll still occasionally hit badly-written software that doesn't even think about other encodings and doesn't handle them properly. The only defense against that situation, where you declare your encoding properly and it still doesn't work, is to just use the encoding that the software was written to expect, which is almost certainly the worldwide default.