title: What character set / encoding does the windows event log use?
body: <p><strong>Background:</strong></p>
  
  <p>I'm working on a solution which will include writing data from multiple countries and reading from to the windows event log (e.g. if there's an exception processing a customer record I may include the customer's name in the description text to make it more human readable; customers' names are likely to require special characters from their language - and we will never take Prince as a customer).<br>
  I'm writing and reading as various systems in our business are writing whilst I'm defining the monitoring system which will be reading from &amp; working with event log data.</p>
  
  <p>I've looked on Google but can't find any relevant information on this.
  Looking at the XML view of Events there's no file header / encoding attribute defined.
  I'd assume it's UTF-8 in the later versions, but can't find this documented / would be surprised if older versions supported that encoding.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Questions:</strong></p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>What character set is used by the Windows Event Log?</li>
  <li>Is it the same for all versions of Windows?</li>
  </ul>