XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Platform-Dependent Character Sets

In addition to the standard character sets discussed previously, many vendors have at one time or another produced proprietary character sets to meet the needs of their specific platform. Often, they contain special characters the vendor saw a need for, such as Apple’s trademarked open apple

or the box-drawing characters, such as

and

, used for cell boundaries in early DOS spreadsheets. Microsoft, IBM, and Apple are the three most prolific inventors of character sets. The single most common such set is probably Microsoft’s Cp1252, a variant of Latin-1 that replaces the C1 controls with more graphic characters. Hundreds of such platform-dependent character sets are in use today. Documentation for these ranges from excellent to nonexistent.

Platform-specific character sets like these should be used only within a single system. They should never be placed on the wire or used to transfer data between systems. Doing so can lead to nasty surprises in unexpected places. For example, displaying a file that contains some of the extra Cp1252 characters

, ‰, ^, ...