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$CharacterEncoding

$CharacterEncoding
specifies the default raw character encoding to use for input and output functions.
  • The setting $CharacterEncoding=None takes all special characters to be represented externally by printable ASCII sequences such as \[Name] and \:nnnn.
  • Typical examples include:
"AdobeStandard"Adobe standard PostScript font encoding
"ASCII"full ASCII, with control characters
"EUC"extended Unix code for Japanese
"ISOLatin1"ISO 8859-1 standard
"ISOLatin2"ISO 8859-2 standard
"ISOLatin3"ISO 8859-3 standard
"ISOLatin4"ISO 8859-4 standard
"ISOLatinCyrillic"ISO 8859-5 standard
"MacintoshRoman"Macintosh roman font encoding
"PrintableASCII"printable ASCII
"ShiftJIS"shift-JIS encoding of JIS X 0208-1990 and extensions
"Symbol"symbol font encoding
"Unicode"raw 16-bit Unicode (with +1 byte ordering)
"UTF8"Unicode transformation format
"WindowsANSI"Windows standard font encoding
"ZapfDingbats"Zapf dingbats font encoding
  • With $CharacterEncoding="encoding" characters that are included in the encoding can be input in their raw 8- or 16-bit form, and will be output in this form.
  • Unencoded characters can be input and will be output in standard \[Name] or \:nnnn form.
  • When using a text-based interface, resetting the value of $CharacterEncoding has an immediate effect on standard input and output in a Mathematica session.
  • When using the notebook front end, raw character encodings are normally handled automatically based on the fonts you use. Only raw 16-bit Unicode is ever sent through the MathLink connection to the kernel.
  • $CharacterEncoding affects the input and output of all characters, including those in symbol names and comments.
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