Many of us have faced character encoding issues because we are not in control of our input sources and made the common assumption that UTF-8 covers everything.
In my lab, as an example, some of our social media posts have included ZawGyi Burmese character sets rather than Unicode Burmese. (Because Myanmar developed technology In a closed to the world environment, they made up their own non-standard character set which is very common still in Mobile phones.). We had fully tested the app with Unicode Burmese, but honestly didn’t know ZawGyi was even a thing that we would see in our dataset. We’ve also had problems with non-Unicode word separators in Arabic. What we’ve found to be helpful is to view the troubling code in a hex editor and determine what non-standard characters may be causing the problem. It may be some data conversion is necessary before insertion. But the first step is knowing WHICH characters are causing the issue.
