Integration Guide

Website Payments Standard Checkout Integration Guide November 2005 51
Using Your Merchant Account Profile and Tools
Language Encoding Your Data
2
letterforms, numbers, punctuation, and symbols of American English. Another example of a
character set is Big 5, which is one of the most widely implemented Chinese character sets.
Character encoding, on the other hand, refers to how a particular character set is represented
internally in data processing; that is, how the individual characters are actually stored and
operated on. There many different kinds of character encodings. For example, an encoding
might allow 7, 8, or 16 computer bits for a single character.
PayPal refers to these two terms together as language encoding.
Changing Your Language Encoding
With your Language Encoding preferences, you can precisely control the encoding of the
data that PayPal should expect from your website’s use of any PayPal Website Payment
button, and the encoding of the data that your website expects to receive back from PayPal
When you sign up for a new business account with PayPal, the PayPal system determines your
character set and its encoding based on your country of origin, as specified by you during
signup. For example, if your postal address indicates France, by default your Selling
Preferences language encoding is set to a Western language character set.
Navigating Your Profile: Language Encoding
To set the default language encoding for your PayPal Business account, log in to your account
and click the Profile tab. In the Selling Preferences column, click Language Encoding.
FIGURE 2.11 Profile Selling Preferences for Language Encoding