Skip to main content

What is a code page and why is it needed?

Code pages are necessary because ANSI files only have 8 bits to display a character (char). This means there are only 256 possible characters--not nearly enough for all languages of the world.

The American charset needs only 128 different chars = 7-bit. Because 7-bit was a bit inefficient for computers, this led to the need for another bit; thus, currently, another 128 possibilities are available to display chars.

On MS-DOS systems, some of these bits have been used for drawing boxes and lines. With Windows, these boxes and lines have been removed from the charsets and more foreign chars have been added. For the most Western languages like English, French, German, and others, these additional chars work efficiently. For example, the German charset needs only seven extra chars to the US charset - leaving enough space for special chars from Spain, Norway, and so forth.

However, for certain charsets, such as Cyrillic charsets, the space was not big enough. Codepages fill that gap. A code page in Windows is nothing more than information, so that the upper 128 chars use some other characters. For example, instead of the German umlaut Ü, a Cyrillic Ш appears. both of these items have the ANSI value 205. Thus, if the Windows codepage 1252 is selected, a Ü appears, while with the Russian Windows codepage 1251 Ш (sha) is displayed.

If code pages are used, the system cannot possibly show Ü and Ш on the same display. This is only possible if UNICODE is used. For example, this page uses UNICODE (UTF-8) to display both chars.

While this solves the problem for most of the languages, the code page technique does not help languages with more than 128 special characters, such as Japanese, Korean and Chinese. For these languages, DBCS is available. While the lower 128 characters are still the same as in US code pages, the upper 128 are specially encoded. In this system, one character of the upper 128 chars starts a multi-byte sequence. This means that one character is stored in one or many chars. For example, in Japanese shift-jis, one character can use up to five bytes.

Thus, if a person writes a text file on her or his computer and does not use UNICODE to save it, the current code page is used. If this file is given to someone with some other current codepage, the file is not displayed correctly. So, if you are in Western Europe or the USA, and you get a text file from someone in Greece, Turkey, China, or Japan, the chances are high that the file is useless to you. Kaboom can fix these problems. Simply convert the file into UNICODE and print, edit, or use the file in any way--without losing information. If you edit the file and you want to return it with your changes, simply convert the file back into the code page that the receiver needs. Kaboom makes the entire process easy and quick.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Amelie Back In Taiwan, Reunion With Mister Donuts

Amelie finally back in Taiwan!  Have missed her for three months, but have been busy at work, not had chance to catch up with her.  However, Amelie did some catching up herself...with her favourite Mister Donuts! You must cut down on those foods!

Happy 2nd Birthday Amelie!

Another step up the age ladder for my daughter Amelie (populary known as Tongtong too). Time certainly has flown, and with each day, it doesn't get any easier! She's started to form her own opinions and learning to express them in various different ways. She's a clever little one, but still lacks a certain amount of discipline. That's probably going to come from me, because Chien-yu is a little soft. I just hope she knows it for own good when I give her the smack-botty when she steps out of line. Last night we sang her the birthday song just before we slept (its was about 1am already). After a couple of choruses, she picked it up quickly and sang her own birthday song! Well, almost anyway, because sounded like "Hapi tu tu tu you". More practise for next year! I will add photos later on this evening.

Goodbye P-100

I'm just going to upload the last ever set of photos from our loyal Sony P-100. I will update this post tomorrow. Yup, the Sony P-100 is a gonna. It ain't gonna rise from the ashes, this time... For now here are some photos taken today around Taipei using the Sony P-100 before the evening's accident, which involved Chien-yu, her foot and the hard marble floor we have in our room. We now got a good excuse to get a new, better digital camera. Its going to have to be a Sony one though, because I invested in a 1GB memory stick. Need to make use of that as much as I can! Sigh, money, money and more money.