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UTF-8 vs. cp932: Why Some Bugs Only Show Up on Japanese Windows

"It works fine on my Mac, but it crashes the moment we hand it to Windows" is a report a lot of developers eventually hear. More often than not, the culprit is a character encoding mismatch.

  • Character encoding maps symbols to byte sequences for storage or transfer.
  • UTF-8 supports nearly all characters, including emojis; cp932 does not.
  • Python assumes platform default encoding (UTF-8 on macOS/Linux, cp932 on Windows).

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