Computing desk
< October 31	<< Oct \| November \| Dec >>	November 2 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

November 1[edit]

Text limit in 4000 bytes[edit]

So my friend asks me to fill out her university application form for a university in South Korea, and one of the requirements in the application is to fill some sort of personal statement with a maximum size of 4000 bytes.Now I find it really weird, because usually people define the limit as in word limit in essay, or character limit as in SMS or Twitter. But bytes? Is this having something to do with UTF-8 and Korean language? How do you even count it? Fëanor Engineering (talk) 07:53, 1 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

SMS are actually limited to 140 bytes each. The number of characters depends on the code set used. Nil Einne (talk) 08:03, 1 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Should also mention that Concatenated SMS also requires a few bytes for the header to allow recomposition hence have fewer characters per SMS than a single SMS. Nil Einne (talk) 13:00, 1 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In UTF-8 there would be 2 bytes per character. So that would be about 2000 Korean characters. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 08:31, 1 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Actually a 2-byte UTF-8 sequence can only encode Unicode characters between U+0080 and U+07FF. All Hangul glyphs have values larger than U+07FF, so it takes three bytes to encode one Hangul glyph. So 4000 bytes would only allow 1333 Hangul glyphs encoded in UTF-8. Encoding in UTF-16 or UCS-2 would allow 2000 Hangul glyphs, if such an encoding is allowed by the university. CodeTalker (talk) 13:56, 1 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a chance you could contact the university admissions office and ask what coding they use, or ask for additional technical details regarding the size requirement? And if you're concerned about it affecting her application, just contact them in your own name and don't mention whom you're helping. I doubt that it's something that is of relevance to the application itself (it's not like the word limit that you mention, which might be imposed so that the admissions folks don't have to read ten-page essays), so they probably wouldn't mind explaining how they calculate the total size. Might as well throw in something extra, like "I'd like to know beforehand, so I don't write up something that's a little too long and have to weaken it by cutting parts after I've finished". Nyttend (talk) 18:05, 3 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

LG-639 Widgets[edit]

A webpage listing all the widgets available along with a guidance on how to install each widgets please? 103.230.106.4 (talk) 18:33, 1 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Since no one answered this, what I will say is that there appears to be no centralised list of all of them. Instead they come and go with apps. If you install an app, it may come with a widget. On the web you can find some lists of what others think are good widgets, but it is not exhaustive. Our Android widget page is not up to scratch. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 00:14, 6 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]