There Ain't No Such Thing As Plain Text

This article definitely shines some like on character encodings. Especially UTF-8 and Unicode.

"It does not make sense to have a string without knowing what encoding it uses."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

You have no choice but to read it or it will come back to haunt you if you don't. I'm not kidding. If you say you already know, then I say read it anyway. Wait, let me say it in not a rude way. Can you please, pretty please read this page so you don't screw yourself later on in your code.

I can think of a few instances where my code came back to haunt me when I didn't use a charset/encoding or used the wrong one. Learn from your mistakes, or better yet. Learn from others'.