The main criteria in determing whether a code page sucks? Suckage, of course!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/08/30 03:16 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/08/30/4641553.aspx

Rasqual asks:

Hello Michael,

I'll keep the question short:

What makes a 'good' encoding, and what makes it broken?

When I think back to the various code pages that I have considered to be broken in one way or another:

• 22/01/2005    Not all code pages work right [talks about the problems with code page 20269]
• 19/04/2005    A few of the gotchas of MultiByteToWideChar [Talks about the problems with Vietnamese code page 1258]
• 24/08/2005    You probably don't want to use Microsoft's code page 20269
• 12/09/2005    You probably don't want to use Microsoft's code page 21027
• 08/11/2005    More than you ever wanted to know about CP_SYMBOL [talks about symbol code page 42]
• 22/04/2006    Dial 911, code page 864 isn't breathing
• 17/08/2007    Sometimes people use code pages even when the code pages are really lame

And I really can't discern any particular pattern in them -- some just have weird implementation issues, some are done in less than ideal ways, and some are simply outright broken.

So it seems like any code page that has troubles is one that I would call broken. I have pretty high standards here, like I do in other areas. :-)

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Mihai on 30 Aug 2007 8:18 PM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 30 Aug 2007 9:07 PM:

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