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iosmacoskeyboard

Are there any keyboard character code differences between PC and Mac?

So I'm working on a site in PHP/JS and also a database. I have a co-worker that sends me documents written on Apple devices and I'm on a PC. Since I don't have access to a Mac, I'd like to know if spaces and punctuation are identical typed on different keyboards.

I want to be able to copy the contents of the documents and paste it in the database, however I don't want to assume that the PC dash character is the same as a Mac dash (that might be an actual minus character).. or that a PC space turns out to be a Mac narrow/en space.

I could just test a received document, but she works all over the place and never knows where she wrote what.

This is a programming question because I'm pasting mathematical expressions where such characters make a difference.. and also using PHP and JavaScript to interpret those characters.

Solution

  • The main issue is the character encoding in the document. Mostly likely that's a Unicode encoding (e.g. UTF-8) which is fully cross-platform.

    Someone using a U.S. keyboard layout (and probably most others) intending to type something like dash/hyphen/minus would most likely produce HYPHEN-MINUS U+002D. There are, of course, ways of typing EN DASH U+2013, EM DASH U+2014, SMALL EM DASH U+FE58, HYPHEN U+2010, and others, but the user would have to do that deliberately. It wouldn't be done routinely just because they're using a Mac.

    Also, some editors or word processors may do "smart substitutions", replacing the ASCII characters with fancier (more typographically correct) non-ASCII ones. That would be independent of Mac vs. PC. If it does that, the character would still come across to the PC as such, but if your use of the document data is sensitive to such differences (as is apparently the case), then that would be problematic.

    It would be very unlikely that Space would routinely be anything other than a normal SPACE U+0020. There are, of course, ways of typing variants such as NO-BREAK SPACE U+00A0, EN SPACE U+2002, EM SPACE U+2003, etc., but the user would have to go out of their way to type those. And I doubt smart substitutions would replace normal spaces.