Legacy encoding

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.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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.

Related Topics:
Euro - 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.