What version of notepad++ should i use? unicode or ansi? i only do web design coding (php/css/html)

Question

Hi

what version of notepad++ should i use? unicode or ansi? i only do web design coding (php/css/html)

Answer 1

Unicode, for sure.

If you are only doing English-language sites it doesn't really matter, but Unicode supports just about any language and encoding out there, whereas ANSI is limited more or less to the English language or languages which don't have "strange letters" (like á, í, ö, þ, ð and such).

So when in doubt, use Unicode. Switch to ANSI only if you have problems with the Unicode version.

UTF-8 is something you may run into quite a bit, which is the encoding of Unicode, and for your purposes you may consider them the same thing. So you always want UTF-8/Unicode unless it gives you problems, and even then it's preferable to fix those problems rather than reverting to a more limited encoding... and that limited encoding may also cause you problems anyway.

If you are doing development for other languages (French, Spanish or whatever), you may need the Unicode version.

EDIT: Even if you don't include any non-English language in your code itself, there are mechanisms which detect the encoding type of your code, so it may still matter. Same rules apply; Unicode/UTF-8 unless it gives you problems, and then first try fixing those problems and if you can't, try ANSI knowing that it may give you problems with other languages than English.

Answer 2

These are the settings i am using and i have never ever had any problems:

So i am using "UTF-8 without BOM", really have no idea what is that BOM, but i do remember that i had some problems with "UTF-8", and i did some little googleing and i found out that its better to use it without BOM. But again cant remember really why, its something with linebreaks or something. :)