Where are those code pages from?

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/09/09 03:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/09/09/462825.aspx

Kevin asked me, via the Contact link:

Having spent a considerable amount of time browsing the internet, knowledgebases etc. and reading lots of information about encodings, I need some "expert" help (please!).

We are writing a worldwide .NET application to get data from IBM mainframes including Japanese, and though I've seen codepages 50930 and 50939 documented I've never been able to find the actual encodings or .nls files.

Do these encodings exist for Windows (.NET) and if so where can I get them?

I even tried installing Japanese Windows XP!

We are a Certified Partner but getting this information has proved to be near impossible!

When I look at the Character Set Recognition (Internet Explorer - DHTML), it has the following items in it:

CharsetFriendlyName

Preferred Charset Label

Aliases

IE Ver

Min OS

CodePage

FamilyCodePage

IBM EBCDIC (Japanese and Japanese Katakana)

x-EBCDIC-JapaneseAndKana

 

IE5

Win2000

50930

932

IBM EBCDIC (Japanese and Japanese-Latin)

x-EBCDIC-JapaneseAndJapaneseLatin

 

IE5

Win2000

50939

932

IBM EBCDIC (Japanese and US-Canada)

x-EBCDIC-JapaneseAndUSCanada

 

IE5

Win2000

50931

932

IBM EBCDIC (Japanese katakana)

x-EBCDIC-JapaneseKatakana

 

IE5

Win2000

20290

932

Note that these code pages do not exist in NLS, so either they exist in MLang or maybe even in IE directly (though probably in MLang, which is mostly where this whole list comes from). I think I mentioned that sometimes MLang actually calls the NLS code page functionality, anyway, right?

You can certainly try to do the conversions in MLang and see what happens, right?

Now the EBCDIC code pages are not very great when it comes to coverage of a huge variety of scripts, if you know what I mean. There are many good reasons why IBM has ICU rather than extensive international support based on the EBCDIC code pages!

Perhaps you may even find that 932 covers it all just as well or better?

 

This post brought to you by "ヒ" (U+30d2, a.k.a. KATAKANA LETTER HI)

# Mihai on 9 Sep 2005 2:11 PM:

I have tried to use IEnumCodePage from MLang, but I only get 20290 (from the list).

I did also some digging in the registry, (in "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MIME\Database", where MLang keeps the data), there is no alias or anything for 50930, 50931, 50939.

Weird!
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