Gets and sets the code page used when reading and writing text.

Syntax

object.CodePage [= value ]

Remarks

The CodePage property is an integer value which specifies how strings are encoded when data is sent or received. Any valid code page identifier may be specified. Some common values are:

Value	Description
0	Text sent and received using a string should be converted using the ANSI code page for the current locale. This is the default encoding type.
1	Text sent and received using a string should be converted using the system default OEM code page. The OEM code page typically contains characters that are used by console applications and are based on character sets commonly used by MS-DOS. It is not recommended that you use this code page unless you know that the remote host is sending text which includes OEM characters.
1252	Text sent and received using a string should be converted using the Windows ANSI code page for western European languages. This code page is commonly used by legacy Windows applications for English and some other western languages. It should be noted that while this code page is similar to ISO 8859-1 character encoding, it is not identical.
28591	Text sent and received using a string should be converted using the ISO 8859-1 code page for western European languages. This code page is commonly referred to as Latin-1 and is similar to the Windows 1252 code page.
65000	Data that is sent and received using a string should be converted using UTF-7 encoding. If this code page is specified, data written to the socket will be encoded as UTF-7 encoded Unicode. All data received from the server will be converted from UTF-7. It is not recommended that you use this code page unless you know that the remote host is sending UTF-7 encoded text.
65001	Data that is sent and received using a string should be converted using UTF-8 encoding. If this code page is specified, data written to the socket will be encoded as UTF-8 encoded Unicode. All data received from the server will be converted from UTF-8 to UTF-16 Unicode. Because UTF-8 is backwards compatible with the ASCII character set, it is safe to use this encoding option when sending and receiving ASCII text.

A complete list of available code page identifiers can be found in Microsoft's documentation for the Win32 API.

All data which is exchanged over a socket is sent and received as 8-bit bytes, typically referred to as "octets" in networking terminology. However, the internal string type used by ActiveX controls are Unicode where each character is represented by 16 bits. To send and receive data using strings, these Unicode strings are converted to a stream of bytes.

By default, strings are converted to an array of bytes using the code page for the current locale, mapping the 16-bit Unicode characters to bytes. Similarly, when reading data from the socket into a string buffer, the stream of bytes received from the remote host are converted to Unicode before they are returned to your application.

If you are exchanging text with another system and it appears to corrupted or characters are being replaced with question marks or other symbols, it is likely the system is sending text which is using a different character encoding. Most services use UTF-8 encoding to represent non-ASCII characters and selecting the UTF-8 code page will typically resolve the issue.

Strings are only guaranteed to be safe when sending and receiving text. Using a string data type is not recommended when reading or writing binary data to a socket. If possible, you should always use a byte array as the buffer parameter for the Read and Write methods whenever you are exchanging binary data.

For backwards compatibility, the control defaults to using the code page for the current locale. This property value directly corresponds to Windows code page identifiers, and will accept any valid code page in addition to the values listed above. Setting this property to an invalid code page will result in an error.

Data Type

Integer (Int32)

See Also

Read Method, ReadLine Method, Write Method, WriteLine Method