As a result, the interpretation of text, input, sorting, display, and storage depends on the knowledge of all the different types of character sets and their encodings. Programs have been written to handle either one single encoding at a time and switch between them, or to convert between external and internal encodings. There is no single, authoritative source of precise definitions of many of the encodings and their names. However, IANA is the best source for names, and our Character Set repository is a good source of encoding definitions for each platform. The transferring of text from one machine to another one often causes some loss of information.
Some platforms have a different interpretation of the text than the other platforms.
For example, Shift-JIS can be interpreted differently on Windows compared to Unix. Windows maps byte value 0x5C to the backslash symbol, while some Unix machines map that byte value to the Yen symbol. Another problem arises when a character in the codepage looks like the Unicode Greek letter Mu or the Unicode micro symbol. Some platforms map this codepage byte sequence to one Unicode character, while another platform maps it to the other Unicode character. Fallbacks can partially fix this problem by mapping both Unicode characters to the same codepage byte sequence.