{"id":8273,"date":"2012-02-20T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-02-20T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2012\/02\/20\/whats-the-difference-between-text-document-text-document-ms-dos-format-and-unicode-text-document\/"},"modified":"2012-02-20T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-02-20T07:00:00","slug":"whats-the-difference-between-text-document-text-document-ms-dos-format-and-unicode-text-document","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20120220-00\/?p=8273","title":{"rendered":"What's the difference between Text Document, Text Document – MS-DOS Format, and Unicode Text Document?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alasdair King asks why Wordpad has three formats, Text Document<\/i>, Text Document – MS-DOS Format<\/i>, and Unicode Text Document<\/i>. “Isn’t at least one redundant?<\/a>”\n Recall that in Windows, three code pages have special status.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Unicode (more specifically, UTF-16LE) <\/li>\n
  2. CP_ACP<\/code>, commonly known as the ANSI code page, although that is a misnomer<\/a> <\/li>\n
  3. CP_OEM<\/code>, commonly known as the OEM code page, although that too is a misnomer<\/a>. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Three text file formats. Three encodings. Hm… I wonder…\n As you might have guessed by now, the three text file formats correspond to the three special code pages. Now it’s just a matter of deciding which one matches with which. The easiest one is the Unicode one; it seems clear that Unicode Text Document<\/i> matches with Unicode. Okay, we now have to figure out how Text Document<\/i> and Text Document – MS-DOS Format<\/i> map to CP_ACP<\/code> and CP_OEM<\/code>. But another piece of the puzzle is pretty clear, because MS-DOS used the so-called OEM code page<\/a>. Therefore, by process of elimination, Text Document<\/i> corresponds to CP_ACP<\/code>.\n Now that we have puzzled out what the three text formats correspond to, we can address the question “Isn’t at least one redundant?”\n Michael Kaplan<\/a> explained that ACP and OEM are (usually) different<\/a>. And neither is the same as Unicode. So in fact all three are (usually) different.<\/p>\n

    In the United States, the so-called ANSI code page is code page 1252<\/a>, the so-called OEM code page is code page 437<\/a>, and Unicode is code page 1200. Here’s the string résumé<\/tt> expressed in each of the three encodings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
    Description<\/th>\nEncoding<\/th>\nCode page
    (en-us)<\/th>\n    		Bytes<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
    Text Document<\/td>\nCP_ACP<\/td>\n1252<\/td>\n72 E9 73 75 6D E9<\/tt><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    Text Document – MS-DOS Format<\/td>\nCP_OEM<\/td>\n437<\/td>\n72 82 73 75 6D 82<\/tt><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    Unicode Text Document<\/td>\nUTF-16LE<\/td>\n1200<\/td>\nFF FE 72 00 E9 00 73 00
    75 00 6D 00 E9 00<\/tt><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

    Three encodings, three different files. No redundancy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Alasdair King asks why Wordpad has three formats, Text Document, Text Document – MS-DOS Format, and Unicode Text Document. “Isn’t at least one redundant?” Recall that in Windows, three code pages have special status. Unicode (more specifically, UTF-16LE) CP_ACP, commonly known as the ANSI code page, although that is a misnomer CP_OEM, commonly known as the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-8273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-code"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

    Alasdair King asks why Wordpad has three formats, Text Document, Text Document – MS-DOS Format, and Unicode Text Document. “Isn’t at least one redundant?” Recall that in Windows, three code pages have special status. Unicode (more specifically, UTF-16LE) CP_ACP, commonly known as the ANSI code page, although that is a misnomer CP_OEM, commonly known as the […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8273\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}