User Guide

Using external text or XML files that are not Unicode encoded 251
Using external text or XML files that are not Unicode encoded
If you load external files into a Flash Player 7 application that are not Unicode-encoded, the text
in the external files does not appear correctly when Flash Player attempts to show them as
Unicode. You can tell Flash Player to use the traditional code page of the operating system that is
running the player. To do this, add the following code as the first line of code in the first frame of
the Flash application that is loading the data:
system.useCodepage = true;
Set the system.useCodepage property only once in a document; do not use it multiple times in
a document to make the player interpret some external files as Unicode and some as other
encoding because this can yield unexpected results.
If you set the
system.useCodepage property to true, remember that the traditional code page of
the operating system running the player must include the glyphs used in your external text file for
the text to appear. For example, if you load an external text file that contains Chinese characters,
those characters do not appear on a system that uses the CP1252 code page because that code
page does not include Chinese characters. To ensure that users on all platforms can view external
text files used in your Flash applications, you should encode all external text files as Unicode and
leave the
system.useCodepage property set to false by default. This causes Flash Player to
interpret the text as Unicode. For more information, see
System.useCodepage in Flash
ActionScript Language Reference.