Related
Does anyone have a sample code for parsing the CEDICT file? CEDICT is a Chinese-English Dictionary. For instance, currently, if I open it in a text editor, a line in the CEDICT file looks like:
不 不 [bu4] /(negative prefix)/not/no/
I would like to see it as:
不 不 [bu4] /(negative prefix)/not/no/
I found Textwrangler to do this for me as a text editor. What I now need is sample code that achieves the same.
The thing is, it's just an encoding problem. If the line looks like
不 不 [bu4] /(negative prefix)/not/no/
It's because the text editor doesn't know/realize that the text is encoded as UTF-8. Text Wrangler, or its big brother BBEdit, are very good at guessing encoding, and can even be asked to display text in a specific encoding.
Since we don't know what you want, in the end, to achieve, it's hard to tell you exactly what has to be done, specifically. What I can say is that your app (which language are you using anyway?) needs to be Unicode aware (and be able to read/manipulate UTF strings).
I wrote a couple of apps based on the CEDICT, one for Mac OS X, one for Android. Parsing and indexing the CEDICT is not very hard.
UPDATE
Regarding the parsing itself of the CEDICT, it's nothing complicated. I don't do Objective-C, never have, never will, but the process would be the same in any language:
Read a line. Say your own example: 不 不 [bu4] /(negative prefix)/not/no/
You have four fields: Trad. Ch., Simp. Ch., Reading, Meaning(s).
These fields are space separated. Of course the 4th field may contain spaces, so be careful.
Store (I used an sqlite db) the 4 fields in to db.
You might want to remove the slashes from the definition field, replace them with something else.
Loop
You have now converted the CEDICT to a database. That's the easy part. As for tokenizing Chinese, good luck with that, mate. Better minds than mine are still banging their heads on this one.
I am trying to understand this stuff so that I can effectively work on internationalizing a project at work. I have just started and very much like to know from your expertise whether I've understood these concepts correct. So far here is the dumbed down version(for my understanding) of what I've gathered from web:
Character Encodings -> Set of rules that tell the OS how to store characters. Eg., ISO8859-1,MSWIN1252,UTF-8,UCS-2,UTF-16. These rules are also called Code Pages/Character Sets which maps individual characters to numbers. Apparently unicode handles this a bit differently than others. ie., instead of a direct mapping from a number(code point) to a glyph, it maps the code point to an abstract "character" which might be represented by different glyphs.[ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html ]
Fonts -> These are implementation of character encodings. They are files of different formats (True Type,Open Type,Post Script) that contain mapping for each character in an encoding to number.
Glyphs -> These are visual representation of characters stored in the font files.
And based on the above understanding I have the below questions,
1)For the OS to understand an encoding, should it be installed separately?. Or installing a font that supports an encoding would suffice?. Is it okay to use the analogy of a protocol say TCP used in a network to an encoding as it is just a set of rules. (which ofcourse begs the question, how does the OS understands these network protocols when I do not install them :-p)
2)Will a font always have the complete implementation of a code page or just part of it?. Is there a tool that I can use to see each character in a font(.TTF file?)[Windows font viewer shows how a style of the font looks like but doesn't give information regarding the list of characters in the font file]
3)Does a font file support multiple encodings?. Is there a way to know which encoding(s) a font supports?
I apologize for asking too many questions, but I had these in my mind for some time and I couldn't find any site that is simple enough for my understanding. Any help/links for understanding this stuff would be most welcome. Thanks in advance.
If you want to learn more, of course I can point you to some resources:
Unicode, writing systems, etc.
The best source of information would probably be this book by Jukka:
Unicode Explained
If you were to follow the link, you'd also find these books:
CJKV Information Processing - deals with Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese in detail but to me it seems quite hard to read.
Fonts & Encodings - personally I haven't read this book, so I can't tell you if it is good or not. Seems to be on topic.
Internationalization
If you want to learn about i18n, I can mention countless resources. But let's start with book that will save you great deal of time (you won't become i18n expert overnight, you know):
Developing International Software - it might be 8 years old but this is still worth every cent you're going to spend on it. Maybe the programming examples regard to Windows (C++ and .Net) but the i18n and L10n knowledge is really there. A colleague of mine said once that it saved him about 2 years of learning. As far as I can tell, he wasn't overstating.
You might be interested in some blogs or web sites on the topic:
Sorting it all out - Michael Kaplan's blog, often on i18n support on Windows platform
Global by design - John Yunker is actively posting bits of i18n knowledge to this site
Internationalization (I18n), Localization (L10n), Standards, and Amusements - also known as i18nguy, the web site where you can find more links, tutorials and stuff.
Java Internationalization
I am afraid that I am not aware of many up to date resources on that topic (that is publicly available ones). The only current resource I know is Java Internationalization trail. Unfortunately, it is fairly incomplete.
JavaScript Internationalization
If you are developing web applications, you probably need also something related to i18n in js. Unfortunately, the support is rather poor but there are few libraries which help dealing with the problem. The most notable examples would be Dojo Toolkit and Globalize.
The prior is a bit heavy, although supports many aspects of i18n, the latter is lightweight but unfortunately many stuff is missing. If you choose to use Globalize, you might be interested in the latest Jukka's book:
Going Global with JavaScript & Globalize.js - I read this and as far I can tell, it is great. It doesn't cover the topics you were originally asking for but it is still worth reading, even for hands-on examples of how to use Globalize.
Apparently unicode handles this a bit differently than others. ie.,
instead of a direct mapping from a number(code point) to a glyph, it
maps the code point to an abstract "character" which might be
represented by different glyphs.
In the Unicode Character Encoding Model, there are 4 levels:
Abstract Character Repertoire (ACR) — The set of characters to be encoded.
Coded Character Set (CCS) — A one-to-one mapping from characters to integer code points.
Character Encoding Form (CEF) — A mapping from code points to a sequence of fixed-width code units.
Character Encoding Scheme (CES) — A mapping from code units to a serialized sequence of bytes.
For example, the character 𝄞 is represented by the code point U+1D11E in the Unicode CCS, the two code units D834 DD1E in the UTF-16 CEF, and the four bytes 34 D8 1E DD in the UTF-16LE CES.
In most older encodings like US-ASCII, the CEF and CES are trivial: Each character is directly represented by a single byte representing its ASCII code.
1) For the OS to understand an encoding, should it be installed
separately?.
The OS doesn't have to understand an encoding. You're perfectly free to use a third-party encoding library like ICU or GNU libiconv to convert between your encoding and the OS's native encoding, at the application level.
2)Will a font always have the complete implementation of a code page or just part of it?.
In the days of 7-bit (128-character) and 8-bit (256-character) encodings, it was common for fonts to include glyphs for the entire code page. It is not common today for fonts to include all 100,000+ assigned characters in Unicode.
I'll provide you with short answers to your questions.
It's generally not the OS that supports an encoding but the applications. Encodings are used to convert a stream of bytes to lists of characters. For example, in C# reading a UTF-8 string will automatically make it UTF-16 if you tell it to treat it as a string.
No matter what encoding you use, C# will simply use UTF-16 internally and when you want to, for example, print a string from a foreign encoding, it will convert it to UTF-16 first, then look up the corresponding characters in the character tables (fonts) and shows the glyphs.
I don't recall ever seeing a complete font. I don't have much experience with working with fonts either, so I cannot give you an answer for this one.
The answer to this one is in #1, but a short summary: fonts are usually encoding-independent, meaning that as long as the system can convert the input encoding to the font encoding you'll be fine.
Bonus answer: On "how does the OS understand network protocols it doesn't know?": again it's not the OS that handles them but the application. As long as the OS knows where to redirect the traffic (which application) it really doesn't need to care about the protocol. Low-level protocols usually do have to be installed, to allow the OS to know where to send the data.
This answer is based on my understanding of encodings, which may be wrong. Do correct me if that's the case!
I have started to code a multi-language feature for a medium-sized website with a lot of hardcoded text. As the website is supposed to be translated into Japanese and Korean (multibyte character set) I am considering the following:
If I use string externalization, do the strings for Japanese or Korean need to be in unicode form within the locale file (i.e. 台北 instead of 台北 as string value)?
Would it make more sense to store the localization in a DB (i.e. MySQL) and retrieve the respective values via a localization function in PHP?
Your thought input is much appreciated.
Best regards
$0.02 from someone who has some experience with i18n...
Keep your translations in human-readable form, as it will likely be translators and not coders managing these resources.
If this text (hard-coded, you say) is not subject to frequent change, then you may wish to store these resources as files that you read in at runtime.
If this text is subject to frequent change, then you may wish to explore other alternatives for storing resources, such as databases or in-memory key-value stores.
Depending upon your requirements, you may want to consider a mixture of the above.
But I strongly suggest that you avoid mixing code (the HTML character entities) with your translation resources. Most translators will not understand what they mean and may break them when they are translating. And on the flip-side, a programmer may not understand how to insert code or formatting into the translation resources properly, unless they actually understand that language.
tl;dr
- use UTF-8
- don't mix any code/formatting into the translations themselves
- how you store the translations depends upon your requirements
I doubt that string externalization would be your biggest problem. But let me give you some advise.
String externalization
Of course you would need to separate translatable strings from the code. I would recommend storing translation in plain text, UTF-8 encoded file containing key-value pairs:
some.key=some translation
Of course you would need to write a helper script to resolve this at runtime. The script would need to detect end-user's language.
Language detection
Web browsers are so nice to send AcceptLanguage header each time they send a request. What you need to do, is to read the content of this header and check if you support any of the language user has listed. If so, read the resource file (as defined above) and return strings for given language, return your default language otherwise. The code example below will give you the most desired language (which is not necessary the one you support):
<?php
$locale = Locale::acceptFromHttp($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE']);
echo $locale;
?>
This is still, not the biggest of your challenges.
Styles and style sheets
The real problem with multilingual web sites or web applications are styles. People tend to put style definitions in-line, which is problematic to say the least. Also, designers tend to think that Arial is the best font for entire Universe, as well as emphasis always have to come with bolded font. The only problem is, the font might be unreadable under some circumstances.
I must admit, I don't know why it happens, but most of the times web browsers tend to ignore bold attribute for Asian scripts (which is good), but sometimes they do not and it could became a major challenge for end users if your font definition is say font-family:Arial; font-size:10px;.
The other problem could be colors. Depending on your web site design, some colors used might be inappropriate for target customers. That is because we all tend to assign meaning to colors based on our cultural background.
Images containing localizable text could also give you a headache, you would need to either externalize such texts (and write them down just like any other HTML element), or prepare multilingual resources structure (i.e. put all images to directories named after language code ("en", "ja", "ko")).
The real challenge however, are hard-coded formatting tags like <b>, <i>, <u>, <strong>, etc. Nobody should use them nowadays, style classes should be used instead but the common practice is different. You would probably need to replace them with style classes; each element could have more than one style class, which to my surprise is not common knowledge (for example <p class="main boldText">).
OK, once you have your styles externalized, you would probably be forced to implement some sort of CSS Localization Mechanism. This is needed in the lights of what I wrote above. The easiest way to do that is to create directory structure similar to the one I mentioned before - "en" for English base CSS files, "ja" for Japanese and "ko" for Korean, so each language would have their own, separate set of CSS files. This is similar to UI skins, only in that case user won't be able to choose the skin, you will decide on which CSS to present them - you would detect language anyway.
As for in-line style definitions (<p style="whatever">), after you define CSS L10n Mechanism, you could override any style by forcing it with !important keyword. That is, unless somebody in his very wrong mind put this keyword to in-line style definition.
Concatenations
Well, this is your biggest challenge. Even people who understand the need of string externalization tend to concatenate the strings like this:
$result = $label + ": " + $product;
$message = "$your_basket_is + $basket_status + ".";
This poses serious problem for Internationalization (and if it is not resolved for Localization as well). That is because, the order of the sentence tend to be different after translating text into different language (this especially regards to Korean). Also, I showed you hard-coded punctuations, which are not necessary correct for Asian languages. That is what I have to go through on a daily basis :/
What you would probably need to do, is to remove such concatenations, or use some means of message formatting. The PHP example (taken directly from web page I am referencing) would be:
<?php
$fmt = new MessageFormatter("en_US", "{0,number,integer} monkeys on {1,number,integer} trees make {2,number} monkeys per tree");
echo $fmt->format(array(4560, 123, 4560/123));
$fmt = new MessageFormatter("de", "{0,number,integer} Affen auf {1,number,integer} Bäumen sind {2,number} Affen pro Baum");
echo $fmt->format(array(4560, 123, 4560/123));
?>
As you can see in this example, numbers are also formatted to much locale style. This leads us to:
Locale aware formatting
Dates, times, numbers and currencies or other similar information need to be formatted according to user-detected Locale. There is a slight difference here: you should attempt to do that, even if you do not support related language resources (do not have translations). Of course for currency symbol, you would use whatever is your real currency, not the user's default, but the format should respect end user's cultural background.
Summary
I have just presented you with a short introduction to multilingual web site design with focus on Japanese and Korean target markets. If at some point you would need to support Chinese Simplified as well, support for GB18030 encoding would be probably needed as well. This would be very challenging...
You do not want to store all your text as HTML entities. It'll drive you mad. The only reason to do this is if you need to serve your document in an ASCII encoding and cannot embed the characters directly. But in this day and age there's no reason for that; serve your document as UTF-8 and write and store your contents in UTF-8 and be done with it.
Whether or not to store translations in the database depends on many factors, including performance, caching, whether you need to be able to search for the text, whether the text should be editable by non-programmers etc. Usually .mo/.po translation files with gettext are a good way to go unless proven otherwise.
I am just getting started implementing ICU transforms using ICU4C in a C++ program. I am particularly looking at transliteration to and from Chinese.
According to this document, the package supports both "Han-Latin" and "Latin-Han" conversion. As a student of Chinese, this seems surprising to me, as Latin-Han conversion is particularly difficult to do without highly advanced statistical techniques (The closest I have seen is Google Transliterate, which actually does a great job with this even without user input, but this is unfeasible for the present project), much less conversion without tone marks. I am skeptical that this is even possible, without resorting to the de facto foreign-name borrowing characters such as 比尔·莫瑞. This is the approach taken by Google Maps in their international domains, as we can see in this paper (PDF)
Anyhow, I was willing to suspend disbelief, and after consulting documentation and tutorials, I was able to construct two Transliterator objects (to and from) and perform simple transliteration using them.
While Han-Latin worked pretty passably (about 80% accuracy for simple data), Latin-Han seemed not to work at all, returning the same "latin" string that was input, which is consistent with the results I get using the online transform sample, and consistent with what I know about Chinese. I managed to find this table, which I think is what is used for both sources, as we can see here:
{ "Latin-Han", "file", "t_Hani_Latn", "REVERSE" },
{ "Han-Latin", "file", "t_Hani_Latn", "FORWARD" },
I would presume this meant that given a pinyin string it could potentially work to reproduce the original, but this does not seem to be the case.
I guess my general question is this: is this kind of transform even possible with ICU, or anything besides Google Transliterate? What is the expected output? Relatedly, is there a listing somewhere of the script-pairs that ICU actually supports, if this is not really possible?
Thank you for your time
Note that the data is from the CLDR project, http://cldr.unicode.org . The script pairs that ICU supports are many, ICU will attempt to use a pivot script ( such as Han to Latin to Russian ) which is why you can create transliterators such as "Any-Latin". You might try browsing the ICU and CLDR data set. The note at the top of the Han-Latin file says that it does not round trip.
So I've read Joel's article, and looked through SO, and it seems the only reason to switch from ASCII to Unicode is for internationalization. The company I work for, as a policy, will only release software in English, even though we have customers throughout the world. Since all of our customers are scientists, they have functional enough English to use our software as a non-native speaker. Or so the logic goes. Because of this policy, there is no pressing need to switch to Unicode to support other languages.
However, I'm starting a new project and wanted to use Unicode (because that is what a responsible programmer is supposed to do, right?). In order to do so, we would have to start converting all of the libraries we've written into Unicode. This is no small task.
If internationalization of the programs themselves is not considered a valid reason, how would one justify all the time spent recoding libraries and programs to make the switch to Unicode?
This obviously depends on what your app actually does, but just because you only have an english version in no way means that internationalization is not an issue.
What if I want to store a customer name which uses non-english characters? Or the name of a place in another country?
As an added bonus (since you say you're targeting scientists) is that all sorts of scientific symbols and notiations are supported as part of Unicode.
Ultimately, I find it much easier to be consistent. Unicode behaves the same no matter whose computer you run the app on. Non-unicode means that you use some locale-dependant character set or codepage by default, and so text that looks fine on your computer may be full of garbage characters on someone else's.
Apart from that, you probably don't need to translate all your libraries to Unicode in one go. Write wrappers as needed to convert between Unicode and whichever encoding you use otherwise.
If you use UTF-8 for your Unicode text, you even get the ability to read plain ASCII strings, which should save you some conversion headaches.
They say they will always put it in English now, but you admit you have worldwide clients. A client comes in and says internationalization is a deal breaker, will they really turn them down?
To clarify the point I'm trying to make you say that they will not accept this reasoning, but it is sound.
Always better to be safe than sorry, IMO.
The extended Scientific, Technical and Mathematical character set rules.
Where else can you say ⟦∀c∣c∈Unicode⟧ and similar technical stuff.
Characters beyond the 7-bit ASCII range are useful in English as well. Does anyone using your software even need to write the € sign? Or £? How about distinguishing "résumé" from "resume"?You say it's used by scientists around the world, who may have names like "Jörg" or "Guðmundsdóttir". In a scientific setting, it is useful to talk about wavelengths like λ, units like Å, or angles as Θ, even in English.
Some of these characters, like "ö", "£", and "€" may be available in 8-bit encodings like ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252, so it may seem like you could just use those encodings and be done with it. The problem is that there are characters outside of those ranges that many people use very frequently, and so lots of existing data is encoded in UTF-8. If your software doesn't understand that when importing data, it may interpret the "£" character in UTF-8 as a sequence of 2 Windows-1252 characters, and render it as "£". If this sort of error goes undetected for long enough, you can start to get your data seriously garbled, as multiple passes of misinterpretation alter your data more and more until it becomes unrecoverable.
And it's good to think about these issues early on in the design of your program. Since strings tend to be very low-level concept that are threaded throughout your entire program, with lots of assumptions about how they work implicit in how they are used, it can be very difficult and expensive to add Unicode support to a program later on if you have never even thought about the issue to begin with.
My recommendation is to always use Unicode capable string types and libraries wherever possible, and make sure any tests you have (whether they be unit, integration, regression, or any other sort of tests) that deal with strings try passing some Unicode strings through your system to ensure that they work and come through unscathed.
If you don't handle Unicode, then I would recommend ensuring that all data accepted by the system is 7-bit clean (that is, there are no characters beyond the 7-bit US-ASCII range). This will help avoid problems with incompatibilities between 8-bit legacy encodings like the ISO-8859 family and UTF-8.
Suppose your program allows me to put my name in it, on a form, a dialog, whatever, and my name can't be written with ascii characters... Even though your program is in English, the data may be in other language...
It doesn't matter that your software is not translated, if your users use international characters then you need to support unicode to be able to do correct capitalization, sorting, etc.
If you have no business need to switch to unicode, then don't do it. I'm basing this on the fact that you thought you'd need to change code unrelated to component you already need to change to make it all work with Unicode. If you can make the component/feature you're working on "Unicode ready" without spreading code churn to lots of other components (especially other components without good test coverage) then go ahead and make it unicode ready. But don't go churn your whole codebase without business need.
If the business need arises later, address it then. Otherwise, you aren't going to need it.
People in this thread may suppose scenarios where it becomes a business requirement. Run those scenarios by your product managers before considering them scenarios worth addressing. Make sure they know the cost of addressing them when you ask.
Well for one, your users might know and understand english, but they can still have 'local' names. If you allow your users to do any kind of input to your application, they might want to use characters that are not part of ascii. If you don't support unicode, you will have no way of allowing these names. You'd be forcing your users to adopt a more simple name just because the application isn't smart enough to handle special characters.
Another thing is, even if the standard right now is that the app will only be released in English, you are also blocking the possibility of internationalization with ASCII, adding to the work that needs to be done when the company policy decides that translations are a good thing. Company policy is good, but has also been known to change.
I'd say this attitude expressed naïveté, but I wouldn't be able to spell naïveté in ASCII-only.
ASCII still works for some computer-only codes, but is no good for the façade between machine and user.
Even without the New Yorker's old-fashioned style of coöperation, how would some poor woman called Zoë cope if her employers used such a system?
Alas, she wouldn't even seek other employment, as updating her résumé would be impossible, and she'd have to resume instead. How's she going to explain that to her fiancée?
The company I work for, **as a policy**, will only release software in English, even though we have customers throughout the world.
1 reason only: Policies change, and when they change, they will break your existing code. Period.
Design for evil, and you have a chance of not breaking your code so soon. In this case, use Unicode. Happened to me on a brazilian specific stock-market legacy system.
Many languages (Java [and thus most JVM-based language implementations], C# [and thus most .NET-based language implementatons], Objective C, Python 3, ...) support Unicode strings by preference or even (nearly) exclusively (you have to go out of your way to work with "strings" of bytes rather than of Unicode characters).
If the company you work for ever intends to use any of these languages and platforms, it would therefore be quite advisable to start planning a Unicode-support strategy; a pilot project in particular might not be a bad idea.
That's a really good question. The only reason I can think of that has nothing to do with I18n or non-English text is that Unicode is particularly suited to being what might be called a hub character set. If you think of your system as a hub with its external dependencies as spokes, you want to isolate character encoding conversions to the spokes, so that your hub system works consistently with your chosen encoding. What makes Unicode a ideal character set for the hub of your system is that it acknowledges the existence of other character sets, it defines equivalences between its own characters and characters in those external character sets, and there's an ongoing process where it extends itself to keep up with the innovation and evolution of external character sets. There are all sorts of weird encodings out there: even when the documentation assures you that the external system or library is using plain ASCII it often turns out to be some variant like IBM775 or HPRoman8, and the nice thing about Unicode is that no matter what encoding is thrown at you, there's a good chance that there's a table on unicode.org that defines exactly how to convert that data into Unicode and back out again without losing information. Then again, equivalents of a-z are fairly well-defined in every character set, so if your data really is restricted to the standard English alphabet, ASCII may do just as well as a hub character set.
A decision on encoding is a decision on two things - what set of characters are permitted and how those characters are represented. Unicode permits you to use pretty much any character ever invented, but you may have your own reasons not to want or need such a wide choice. You might still restrict usernames, for example, to combinations of a-z and underscore, maybe because you have to put them into an external LDAP system whose own character set is restricted, maybe because you need to print them out using a font that doesn't cover all of Unicode, maybe because it closes off the security problems opened up by lookalike characters. If you're using something like ASCII or ISO8859-1, the storage/transmission layer implements a lot of those restrictions; with Unicode the storage layer doesn't restrict anything so you might have to implement your own rules at the application layer. This is more work - more programming, more testing, more possible system states. The tradeoff for that extra work is more flexibility, application-level rules being easier to change than system encodings.
The reason to use unicode is to respect proper abstractions in your design.
Just get used to treating the concept of text properly. It is not hard. There's no reason to create a broken design even if your users are English.
Just think of a customer wanting to use names like Schrödingers Cat for files he saved using your software. Or imagine some localized Windows with a translation of My Documents that uses non-ASCII characters. That would be internationalization that has, though you don't support internationalization at all, have effects on your software.
Also, having the option of supporting internationalization later is always a good thing.
Internationalization is so much more than just text in different languages. I bet it's the niche of the future in the IT-world. Heck, it already is. A lot has already been said, just thought I would add a small thing. Even though your customers right now are satisfied with english, that might change in the future. And the longer you wait, the harder it will be to convert your code base. They might even today have problems with e.g. file names or other types of data you save/load in your application.
Unicode is like cooties. Once it "infects" one area, it's usually hard to contain it given interconnectedness of dependencies. Sooner or later, you'll probably have to tie in a library that is unicode compliant and thus will use wchar_t's or the like. Instead of marshaling between character types, it's nice to have consistent strings throughout.
Thus, it's nice to be consistent. Otherwise you'll end up with something similar to the Windows API that has a "A" version and a "W" version for most APIs since they weren't consistent to start with. (And in some cases, Microsoft has abandoned creating "A" versions altogether.)
You haven't said what language you're using. In some languages, changing from ASCII to Unicode may be pretty easy, whereas in others (which don't support Unicode) it might be pretty darn hard.
That said, maybe in your situation you shouldn't support Unicode: you can't think of a compelling reason why you should, and there are some reasons (i.e. your cost to change your existing libraries) which argue against. I mean, perhaps 'ideally' you should but in practice there might be some other, more important or more urgent, thing to spend your time and effort on at the moment.
If program takes text input from the user, it should use unicode; you never know what language the user is going to use.
When using Unicode, it leaves the door open for internationalization if requirements ever change and you are required to use text in other languages than English.
Also, in your new project you could always just write wrappers for the libraries that internally convert between ASCII and Unicode and vice-versa.
Your potential client may already be running a non-unicode application in a language other than English and won't be able to run your program without swichting the windows unicode locale back and forth, which will be a big pain.
Because the internet is overwhelmingly using Unicode. Web pages use unicode. Text files including your customer's documents, and the data on their clipboards, is Unicode.
Secondly Windows, is natively Unicode, and the ANSI APIs are a legacy.
Modern applications should use Unicode where applicable, which is almost everywhere.