Silk Performer is a MBCS-based application, meaning that to be displayed correctly, every string must be encoded in MBCS format. Because Silk Performer, and particularly TrueLog Explorer, visualize and customize data that originates from Web servers with different encodings (UTF-8, EUC-JP, ISO-8859-1, and so on), many string conversion operations may be involved before data can be displayed.
Sometimes when testing UTF-8 encoded Web sites, data containing characters cannot be converted to the active Windows system codepage. In such cases, Silk Performer’s Web Recorder scripts all non-convertible strings into hex format. If the data is only displayed, TrueLog Explorer will replace the non-convertible characters with a configurable replacement character (usually '?').
On an English Windows system with Japanese local settings (system codepage is Shift-JIS) a UTF-8 application is recorded. For some reason a link name on a particular Web page contains a Korean character. Silk Performer’s Web Recorder attempts to convert the string from UTF-8 to Shift-JIS to make it readable in the script. The conversion fails because of the Korean character, which does not occur in the Shift-JIS code page. The Web Recorder then uses hex notation for the link name in the script.