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Internationalization Guide


Understanding Code Pages

Suppose you walk up to a computer running the Icelandic edition of a popular operating system, start up a text editor, enter some Icelandic text, and save the result as a text file. To you, the text file consists of a series of letters, numbers, punctuation, control codes, such as the carriage return, and other characters. But to the computer, the text file consists of a series of numeric values, each of which corresponds to a particular character. For the computer to interpret the numeric values correctly, it needs a table that associates each numeric value with the corresponding character. This table is the code page.

Code pages play key roles in applications to be adapted to multiple locales, so this chapter examines them in depth in the following sections:


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