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Yep. For example, the name of the third-largest city in Poland is "Łódź", which might look like it's pronounced "lods", but is actually pronounced more like "wootch".



Sometimes you end up with parcel addressed to city "??d?". Shipping systems cannot cope with non-ASCII chars more often than I would expect...


I've seen shipping labels with HTML encoded characters, like é and è. I'm not sure if that's better or worse:

Łódź


This is a pretty frequent thing to encounter actually. Just some years ago many websites actually preferred to use ISO/Windows codepages to save space on multibyte Unicode symbols adding HTML entities to represent everything which is not in it the basic ASCII and their primary language alphabet.

Fun fact: I was looking for an e-mail solution for a small company about a decade ago and found Zarafa. It seemed nice and I deployed it happily. Just to find out it only supports the Western European ISO codepage which was hardcoded. I hope they have switched to UTF-8 since then.


Always omit diacritics when giving your address/name to foreign parties which are going to have to ship you anything or issue any documents for you.




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