BUILT-IN MATHEMATICA SYMBOL

$CharacterEncoding

$CharacterEncoding
specifies the default raw character encoding to use for input and output functions.

Details Details

The default setting for $CharacterEncoding is $SystemCharacterEncoding.
The setting $CharacterEncoding=None takes all special characters to be represented externally by printable ASCII sequences such as \[Name] and \:nnnn.
$CharacterEncodings gives a list of all installed character encodings.
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)
	"UTF-8"	Unicode transformation format
	"WindowsANSI"	Windows standard font encoding
	"ZapfDingbats"	Zapf dingbats font encoding

With 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.
$CharacterEncoding also affects characters that appear in Text primitives within graphics.