MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-USING FLASH Use Manual page 365

Unicode and Macromedia Flash Player
Macromedia Flash Player 6 and later supports Unicode text encoding. Any user with Flash
Player 6 or later can view multilanguage text, regardless of the language used by the operating
system running the player, if they have the correct fonts installed.
Flash Player assumes that all external text files associated with a Flash Player application are
Unicode encoded, unless you tell the player otherwise. If you use external text files that are
not Unicode encoded, you can set the
Player to use the traditional code page of the operating system running the player. For more
information, see "Using external text or XML files that are not Unicode-encoded"
on page 385.
For Flash applications in Macromedia Flash Player 5 or earlier that are authored in Flash MX
or earlier, Flash Player 6 and earlier versions display the text using the traditional code page of
the operating system running the player.
For background information on Unicode, see www.Unicode.org.
Text encoding in Flash Player
By default, Flash Player 7 and later assumes that all text it encounters is Unicode encoded. If
your document loads external text or XML files, the text in these files should be UTF-8
encoded. You can create these files using the Strings panel or in a text or HTML editor, such
as Macromedia Dreamweaver, that can save the files in Unicode format.
Flash Player 7 and later supports the 8-bit Unicode format UTF-8, and the 16-bit Unicode
formats UTF-16 BE (Big Endian) and UTF-16 LE (Little Endian). For more information, see
"Unicode encoding formats supported by Flash Player" on page
Unicode encoding formats supported by Flash Player
When reading text data in Flash, Flash Player looks at the first two bytes in the file to detect a
byte order mark (BOM), a standard formatting convention used to identify the Unicode
encoding format. If no BOM is detected, the text encoding is interpreted as UTF-8 (an 8-bit
encoding format). It is recommended that you use UTF-8 encoding in your applications.
If Flash Player detects either of the following BOMs, the text encoding format is interpreted
as follows:
If the first byte of the file is OxFE and the second is OxFF, the encoding is interpreted as
UTF-16 BE (Big Endian). This is used for Macintosh operating systems.
If the first byte of the file is OxFF and the second is OxFE, the encoding is interpreted as
UTF-16 LE (Little Endian). This is used for Windows operating systems.
system.useCodepage
Selecting an encoding language
property to to tell Flash
true
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