Most applications written today handle character data primarily as , using the UTF-16 encoding. However, many legacy applications continue to use character sets based on code pages. Even new applications sometimes have to work with code pages, often for one of the following reasons:

• To communicate with legacy applications.
• To communicate with older mail and news servers, which might not always support Unicode.
• To communicate with the Windows Console.

Note

New Windows applications should use to avoid the inconsistencies of varied code pages and for ease of localization.

 

Each code page is represented by a code page identifier, for example, 1252, and is handled by the Unicode and character set API functions. For a list of supported code page identifiers, see . The "Code Pages" reference on the Microsoft gives full descriptions of many code pages.

Windows code pages, commonly called "ANSI code pages", are code pages for which non-ASCII values (values greater than 127) represent international characters. These code pages are used natively in Windows Me, and are also available on Windows NT and later.