Windows Code Pages - Problems Arising From The Use of Code Pages

Problems Arising From The Use of Code Pages

Microsoft strongly recommends using Unicode in modern applications, but many applications or data files still depend on the legacy code pages. This can cause many problems:

• Programs need to know what code page to use in order to display the contents of files correctly. If a program uses the wrong code page it may show text as mojibake.
• The code page in use may differ between machines, so files created on one machine may be unreadable on another.
• Data is often improperly tagged with the code page, or not tagged at all, making determination of the correct code page to read the data difficult.
• These Microsoft code pages differ to various degrees from some of the standards and other vendors' implementations. This isn't a Microsoft issue per se, as it happens to all vendors, but the lack of consistency makes interoperability with other systems unreliable in some cases.
• The use of code pages limits the set of characters that may be used.
• Characters expressed in an unsupported code page may be converted to question marks (?) or other replacement characters, or to a simpler version (such as removing accents from a letter). In either case, the original character may be lost.