Non-Unicode external files

If you load external text or XML files that are not Unicode-encoded into a Flash Player 7 application, the text in the external files does not appear correctly when Flash Player attempts to show them as Unicode. To tell Flash Player to use the traditional code page of the operating system that is running the player, 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, 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, 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 useCodepage (System.useCodepage property) in the ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference.