what is western european windows text encoding

WHAT IS WESTERN EUROPEAN WINDOWS TEXT ENCODING CODE

Those then each lead to a third byte and those three bytes define the character. For the less common there's a first byte which leads to a sersies of second bytes. Then for the next most common set, it uses a block in the second 128 bytes to be a double byte sequence giving us more characters. The first 128 bytes are all single byte representations of characters. UTF-8 borrowed from the DBCS designs from the Asian codepages. Second, it was designed to use as few bytes as possible which mattered a lot back when it was designed and many people were still using dial-up modems. First it matched the standard codepages for the first 127 characters and so most existing HTML and XML would match it. Now lets' look at UTF-8 because as the standard and the way it works, it gets people into a lot of trouble. Even if you are willing to swear that the file will never have characters out of the range 1 – 127. Point 1 – Never treat specifying the encoding as optional when writing a file. If the encoding is not specified and the program reading the file guess wrong – the file will be misread. If it's not set, then most programs assume it is UTF-8, but that is not a standard and not universally followed. Every HTML and XML file can optionally have the character encoding set in it's header metadata. The two file formats where we can explain this the best, and where everyone trips over it, is HTML and XML. A website in America using an XML file from Greece to display data to a user browsing in Russia, where each is entering data based on their country – that broke the paradigm.įast forward to today.

WHAT IS WESTERN EUROPEAN WINDOWS TEXT ENCODING CODE

mostly were set to use a specified code page. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean each have their own DBCS codepage.Īnd for awhile this worked well. It was a hack, but it kept memory use to a minimum. This gave a total of 128 * 256 additional characters. For each value of a first byte (in these higher ranges), the second byte then identified one of 256 characters.

There were sets for America/Western Europe, Central Europe, Russia, etc.Īnd then for Asia, because 256 characters were not enough, some of the range 128 – 255 had what was called DBCS (double byte character sets). But we ended up with most everyone using a standard set of codepages where the first 127 bytes were identical on all and the second were unique to each set. There of course were numerous charactersets (or codepages) developed early on. In fact we're lucky that the byte worked best as 8 bits or we might have had fewer than 256 bits for each character. Anyone who suggested using 2 bytes for each character instead of one would have been laughed at. The computer industry started with diskspace and memory at a premium. But the second you use those same assumptions in an HTML or XML file that has characters outside the first 127 – then the trouble starts. And because we only use A-Z without any other characters, accents, etc.

Because the characters for the first 127 bytes in the vast majority of encoding schemes map to the same set of characters (more accurately called glyphs). There is no such thing as an unencoded file or a 'general' encoding.Īnd lets add a codacil to this – most Americans can get by without having to take this in to account – most of the time. Unicode does not solve this issue for us (yet).If you write code that touches a text file, you probably need this. So here I am with the same attempt on character encoding. And the first day I had over 9,000 page views. I wrote an earlier post like this about timezones assuming 20 people would read it (and 3 would find it useful).

What is western european windows text encoding