6

What is an example of a character encoding which is not compatible with ASCII and why isn't it?

Also, what are other encoding which have upward compatibility with ASCII (except UTF and ISO8859, which I already know) and for what reason?

Improve this question
1
  • What do you mean by compatible? Reading text written with one character set and encoding and reading it with the wrong one? Also, what do you mean by UTF? If you read ASCII as UTF-16 or UTF-32, you'd likely get decoding errors. Commented Aug 24, 2015 at 22:23

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
7

There are EBCDIC-based encodings that are not compatible with ASCII. For example, I recently encountered an email that was encoded using CP1026, aka EBCDIC 1026. If you look at its character table, letters and numbers are encoded at very different offsets than in ASCII. This was throwing off my email parser particularly because LF is encoded as 0x25 instead of as 0x0A in ASCII.

Improve this answer
Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

4 Comments

Thanks, any example of other forward compatible encoding ?
Most commonly used encodings are completely ASCII-compatible (ISO8859-X/Latin-X, GB 18030, Big5, etc), or at least are mostly compatible with ASCII (SHIFT-JIS, etc). EBCDICs are rare nowadays.
Shift-JIS is a tricky one, because ¥ lives at 0x5c where `` would usually be.
@CraigRinger Shift-Jis also has an overline (U+203E) character at 0x7E in place of '~'. And then there is the ISO-2022 encodings, which use ASCII escape sequences to switch between single-byte and multi-byte modes.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.