14

Language Encoding for Your Data

This chapter tells you how you can set your Profile preferences to indicate the language and 

character encoding that your website uses.

Background Information

Websites that use PayPal in different parts of the world work with different languages. Human 

languages are represented in computing by the terms character set and character encoding. 

A character set is a computer representation of all the individual possible letterforms or word 

symbols of a language. For instance, ASCII (or American Standard Code for Information 

Interchange) is a common character set that has been used for decades to represent the 

letterforms, numbers, punctuation, and symbols of American English. Another example of a 

character set is Big 5, which is one of the most widely implemented Chinese character sets. 

Character encoding, on the other hand, refers to how a particular character set is represented 

internally in data processing; that is, how the individual characters are actually stored and 

operated on. There many different kinds of character encodings. For example, an encoding 

might allow 7, 8, or 16 computer bits for a single character.

PayPal refers to these two terms together as language encoding.

Changing Your Language Encoding

This section describes the default character encoding PayPal assumes for you and how you can 

change that setting.

With your Language Encoding preferences, you can precisely control the encoding of the 

data that PayPal should expect from your website's use of any PayPal website payment button, 

such as Buy Now, Donation, or Website Payments, and the encoding of the data that your 

website expects to receive back from PayPal

Your Default Language Encoding at PayPal Signup

When you sign up for a new business account with PayPal, the PayPal system determines your 

character set and its encoding based on your country of origin, as specified by you during 

signup. For example, if your postal address indicates France, by default your Selling 

Preferences language encoding is set to a Western language character set.

Website Payments Standard Checkout Integration Guide

August, 2005

109