You’ve got strange characters like "�" or "ö" displayed in your application? Yes, handling non-English characters in application code, files and databases can be a challenge, to say the least. Whether that’s German umlauts, Cyrillic letters, Asian glyphs or emojis: It’s always a mess in an international application. In this session, you will see why that is and how handling characters evolved in computing. You will also see how handling characters in applications and databases can be done less painfully. And don’t worry when EBCDIC, BOM or ISO-8859-7 are Greek to you and your Unicode is a bit rusty: We’ll have a look at them, too.