Legacy encoding: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 11:53, 9 February 2006

Revision as of 20:02, 10 April 2006

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In computing, a '''legacy encoding''' is a [[character encoding]] that can't represent all of [[Unicode]], but is still used for compatibility or other reasons.

Many legacy encodings predate Unicode, while others are slight modifications to older encodings to support important new characters such as the [[euro]] sign]] (€) or to satisfy countries that felt there were significant omissions for their language. The best known such encoding is probably [[ISO-8859-15]].

Legacy encodings are numerous, and include the following major groups:

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* The [[ISO-8859]]-n group of single byte encodings

* The [[IBM]]/[[DOS]]/Windows OEM series of single byte [[code page]]s (437,850 and others).

* The single-byte Windows [[Code_pageCode page#Microsoft_code_pagesMicrosoft code pages|"ANSI" code page]]s (125x)

* The windows multibyte code pages used by windows as both ansi and OEM code pages for [[CJK]] languages.

* Various other multibyte CJK encodings such as [[ISO-2022]] and [[EUC]].

[[Category:Character encoding]]