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

View products that this article applies to.

This article was previously published under Q254313

Expand all | Collapse all

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

Back to the top

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.

Back to the top

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>

Back to the top

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>