# Character Set Support ### Licensing Considerations Access to the Academic Benchmarks data and services is licensed by breadth of coverage (authority and subject area) as well as depth of metadata and functionality. If you attempt to access a feature or piece of data and receive a 401 error, check your credentials and the details of the error message body. It may be that your current license does not support the call you are making. In some instances, you'll get a valid response, but the data related to one of these features will simply not be included in the response. E.g. if you are licensed for Standards, but not Topics, when you retrieve a Standard the `topics` relationship will not exist. To clarify or discuss your licensing, contact [AB Support](mailto:absupport@instructure.com?subject=AB%20Connect%20Question%20or%20Comment%20%28v4.1%20API%29) at Instructure or your sales representative. ### Character Set Support UTF-8 is the recommended character set for transmitting data using AB Connect - AB Connect stores data in UTF-8 and it is the most common character set on the web. However, as adoption for Unicode and UTF-8 has evolved over the life of Academic Benchmarks, we've built support for a few other character sets to support legacy situations. AB Connect supports RESPONSES in UTF-8, latin1, ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252 character sets. **Note that at this time AB Connect does not support REQUESTS in any character set other than UTF-8.** To request a specific character set response, include the `Accept-Charset` HTTP header in your request and supply one of the supported values: * utf-8 * iso-8859-1 * latin1 * windows-1252 In the case that utf-8 is desired, there is no need to actually include the `Accept-Charset` header as utf-8 is the default. The AB Connect response includes a `Content-Type` header indicating the data type (application/json) as well as the character set of the response. E.g. ``` `Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8` ``` --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://developerdocs.instructure.com/services/ab-connect/introduction/character-set.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.