Microsoft KB Archive/126562

= Microsoft Knowledge Base =

Question Marks Appear During a Chat Session
Last reviewed: October 7, 1997

Article ID: Q126562

The information in this article applies to:


 * The Microsoft Network versions 1.0, 1.05, 1.2, 1.3, 2.0, 2.5

SYMPTOMS
When you are participating in a chat session on MSN, The Microsoft Network, you may see repeated question marks on the screen when another chat member sends a message.

CAUSE
An MSN member who is using a language (such as Japanese Kanji) that uses a Double Byte Character Set (DBCS) may be sending a message to a chat session that is taking place in a Single Byte Character Set (SBCS) language (such as English).

RESOLUTION
If you are receiving messages filled with question marks from a chat member, use the ignore feature to ignore messages from this member. To ignore a chat member, follow these steps:


 * 1) In the Member List, click the name of the member.
 * 2) On the View menu, click Ignore Members.
 * 3) Click the Ignore Messages From Selected Members check box to select it.
 * 4) Click OK.

MORE INFORMATION
ASCII characters are represented by the values 0 to 127; ANSI includes ASCII but adds characters 128 through 255. In all languages, the ASCII characters are exactly the same, but characters 128-255 are used for letters specific to a language, based on the Code Page associated with the language. This approach handles the character differences for most languages in the world.

Some languages (specifically East Asian languages such as Japanese Kanji, several dialects of Chinese, and Korean) cannot be represented with only 256 characters. The written characters in these languages are entire words rather than individual letters, so there are typically over 6000 different characters.

To handle these languages, Unicode was introduced. Unicode uses two bytes for each character instead of the standard one byte for each character. This is called the Double Byte Character Set (DBCS), as opposed to the Single Byte Character Set (SBCS). The only difference is that all SBCS bytes start with 0 and the first byte of all DBCS words (two bytes) starts with 1.

When an MSN member using DBCS sends a text string into an SBCS chat session, the system converts all the characters to question marks.