Article ID: 254313 - Last Review: May 18, 2007 - Revision: 2.3

PRB: Error Message: Active Server Pages Error 'ASP 0203' Invalid Code Page

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SYMPTOMS

When you try to use a session.codepage or @codepage directive in an Active Server Pages (ASP) page that is hosted on a Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0 Web server, the following error message may occur:

Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0203'
Invalid Code Page
/ProjectName/PageName.asp, line 1
The specified code page attribute is invalid.

If the ASP page is hosted on a Microsoft Internet Information Services 5.0 Web server, the following error message may occur:

Active Server Pages, ASP 0203 (0x80004005)
The specified code page attribute is invalid

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CAUSE

Code pages have been disabled for Internet Information Server 4.0 since Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 4 because of truncation issues, which caused characters larger then 2 bytes to be truncated. This created a problem with some double-byte character sets (DBCS), such as Japanese, that have characters that extended beyond 2 bytes in size. In Internet Information Services 5.0, the utf16(1200) and unicodeFFFE(1201) code pages are disabled.

This behavior is by design.

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RESOLUTION

To work around this issue, try the following:

If you are running Internet Information Server 4.0, upgrade to Internet Information Services 5.0. The following Unicode code pages are valid in Internet Information Services 5.0:
65000 - utf-7
65001 - utf-8
Instead of using Unicode, develop your Web site to be language-specific by using the appropriate character set in the client HTML. For a complete list of available HTML character sets and ASP code pages, see the following Microsoft Web site:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa752010.aspx (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa752010.aspx)
Sample Code:
<%@ Language=VBScript CODEPAGE=932%> <%Session.Codepage=932%>  <HTML> <HEAD> <META NAME="GENERATOR" Content="Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0"> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=shift_jis"> </HEAD> <BODY> </BODY> </HTML>

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MORE INFORMATION

Steps to Reproduce Behavior:

Host an ASP page on a computer that is running Internet Information Server 4.0 or Internet Information Services 5.0.

Add the following code to the page:

<%@ Language=VBScript codepage=1200%>
<!-- This is for the UTF 16 code page -->
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META NAME="GENERATOR" Content="Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=utf16">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
</BODY>
</HTML>