99% if your in the states or an english speaking nation. otherwise you will need unicode/multibyte chars.

Quote Originally Posted by Access_Denied View Post
This is indeed a problem, one that's usually solved by the networking libraries. For instance, when programming with Unix sockets, there are functions to convert numbers to a standard network format, and then functions to convert it back to machine specific format. This way, a 10 bit byte little endian machine can communicate with an 8 bit byte big endian machine, and neither will ever be aware of the difference.

But a lot of this stuff isn't really THAT big of a deal today. If you're running Windows, 99% chance you're running an x86 processor with 8-bit bytes and a 32-bit processor (or a 64-bit processor that's compatible with 32-bit).