>I can't find this setting documented anywhere, what does it do ? What I'm looking for is a way to set a default codepage for unmarked dbf's.

Excuse me if I cover something that you already know...

Codepages simply allow Fox to know how to properly display the data in a table and in what character set to store the data. So, if you were looking at a table with a codepage of 437 and one record had an "é" in it, it would show up as an "é". If you entered a record with an "é" in a field it would be stored as ascii 130. Even though you're seeing it as ascii 233.

CODEPAGE = AUTO in your config.fpw just tells Fox to use this translation ability. If you create or copy a table it will automatically assign the codepage to 1252 and convert the data to the correct character set (in the case of COPY TO). Without it you'll get a lot of junk looking characters when you're looking at dos (437) data in windows.

We get this here because we deal with a lot of purchased data (mailing lists and such) that come from old dos or mainframe systems. If you create a table in Fox and append in data from a table that either doesn't have a codepage set or from a text file, there will be no translation. Fox will assume that the character set of the appended data is 1252 and not do any converstion. In this situation you should use CPZERO to zero out the codepage and then append in the data.

There's a setting under Tools/Options to automatically display to codepage picker when an unmarked table is opened exclusively. You want to have this checked. In the previous example you'd want to set the codepage to 437.

Hope this helps.

paul