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Legacy encoding

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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. Legacy encodings include national, international and vendor encoding standards. [1]

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:

  • The ISO-8859-n group of single byte encodings
  • The IBM/DOS/Windows OEM series of single byte code pages (437, 850, and others).
  • The single-byte Windows "ANSI" code pages (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.

References

  1. ^ "Processing database information using Unicode, a case study", IBM developmentWorks, 1 September 1999

See also

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