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About Unicode support in Flash movies

Text and user interface strings in Flash MX documents (FLA files) are created using double-byte character set (DBCS) encoding. When Flash movies are published or exported in Flash MX format or later, text and UI strings are encoded using Unicode UTF-8, an 8-bit encoding format. The Flash Player stores characters in both UTF-8 and UTF-16 format.

Flash movies in Flash 5 format or earlier use mixed multibyte encoding (the Latin-1 character set for European languages, and the Shift-JIS character set for Asian languages). Text encoding in these files is supported by Flash Player 6, just as it is in earlier versions of the player.

Flash Player versions earlier than Flash Player 6 do not support Unicode. Players in these versions may not be able to read text or UI strings in SWF files that are of the Flash MX format.

When SWF files in Flash MX format are imported back into Flash MX, text and UI strings are converted back into DBCS format. These files can be edited in the Flash authoring environment.