Windows code pages are sets of characters or code pages (known as

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...

s in other operating systems) used in

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

from the 1980s and 1990s. Windows code pages were gradually superseded when Unicode was implemented in Windows, although they are still supported both within Windows and other platforms, and still apply when Alt code shortcuts are used. There are two groups of system code pages in Windows systems: OEM and Windows-native ("ANSI") code pages. (ANSI is the American National Standards Institute.) Code pages in both of these groups are extended ASCII code pages. Additional code pages are supported by standard Windows conversion routines, but not used as either type of system code page.

ANSI code page

ANSI code pages (officially called "Windows code pages" after Microsoft accepted the former term being a misnomer ) are used for native non-Unicode (say,

byte oriented Byte-oriented framing protocol is "a communications protocol in which full bytes are used as control codes. Also known as character-oriented protocol." For example UART communication is byte-oriented. The term "character-oriented" is deprecated, ...

) applications using a graphical user interface on Windows systems. The term "ANSI" is a misnomer because these Windows code pages do not comply with any ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard; code page 1252 was based on an early ANSI draft that became the international standard

ISO 8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1 ...

, which adds a further 32 control codes and space for 96 printable characters. Among other differences, Windows code-pages allocate printable characters to the supplementary control code space, making them at best illegible to standards-compliant operating systems.) Most legacy "ANSI" code pages have code page numbers in the pattern 125x. However, 874 (Thai) and the East Asian multi-byte "ANSI" code pages ( 932, 936, 949, 950), all of which are also used as OEM code pages, are numbered to match IBM encodings, none of which are identical to the Windows encodings (although most are similar). While code page 1258 is also used as an OEM code page, it is original to Microsoft rather than an extension to an existing encoding. IBM have assigned their own, different numbers for Microsoft's variants, these are given for reference in the lists below where applicable. All of the 125x Windows code pages, as well as 874 and 936, are labelled by Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) as "Windows-''number''", although "Windows-936" is treated as a synonym for " GBK". Windows code page 932 is instead labelled as "Windows-31J". ANSI Windows code pages, and especially the code page 1252, were so called since they were purportedly based on drafts submitted or intended for ANSI. However, ANSI and ISO have not standardized any of these code pages. Instead they are either: * Supersets of the standard sets such as those of ISO 8859 and the various national standards (like Windows-1252 vs.

ISO-8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1 ...

), * Major modifications of these (making them incompatible to various degrees, like Windows-1250 vs. ISO-8859-2) * Having no parallel encoding (like Windows-1257 vs. ISO-8859-4; ISO-8859-13 was introduced much later). Also, Windows-1251 follows neither the ISO-standardised ISO-8859-5 nor the then-prevailing

KOI-8 KOI-8 (КОИ-8) is an 8-bit character set standardized in GOST 19768-74. Маркелова Л. Н. Эксплуатация программоуправляемой вычислительной машины «Искра 226». — М.: Ма ...

. Microsoft assigned about twelve of the typography and business characters (including notably, the euro sign, €) in CP1252 to the

code point In character encoding terminology, a code point, codepoint or code position is a numerical value that maps to a specific character. Code points usually represent a single grapheme—usually a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or whitespace—bu ...

s 0x80–0x9F that, in ISO 8859, are assigned to C1 control codes. These assignments are also present in many other ANSI/Windows code pages at the same code-points. Windows did not use the C1 control codes, so this decision had no direct effect on Windows users. However, if included in a file transferred to a standards-compliant platform like Unix or MacOS, the information was invisible and potentially disruptive.

OEM code page

The OEM code pages (

original equipment manufacturer An original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is generally perceived as a company that produces non-aftermarket parts and equipment that may be marketed by another manufacturer. It is a common industry term recognized and used by many professional or ...

) are used by Win32 console applications, and by virtual DOS, and can be considered a holdover from DOS and the original

IBM PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team ...

architecture. A separate suite of code pages was implemented not only due to compatibility, but also because the fonts of VGA (and descendant) hardware suggest encoding of line-drawing characters to be compatible with code page 437. Most OEM code pages share many code points, particularly for non-letter characters, with the second (non-ASCII) half of CP437. A typical OEM code page, in its second half, does not resemble any ANSI/Windows code page even roughly. Nevertheless, two single-byte, fixed-width code pages (874 for Thai and 1258 for Vietnamese) and four multibyte CJK code pages ( 932, 936, 949, 950) are used as both OEM and ANSI code pages. Code page 1258 uses

combining diacritic In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks (including combining accents). Unicode also ...

s, as Vietnamese requires more than 128 letter-diacritic combinations. This is in contrast to VISCII, which replaces some of the C0 (i.e. ASCII) control codes.

History

Initially, computer systems and system programming languages did not make a distinction between

character Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...

s and

byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

s: for the segmental scripts used in most of Africa, the Americas, southern and south-east Asia, the Middle East and Europe, a character needs just one byte, but two or more bytes are needed for the ideographic sets used in the rest of the world. This led to much confusion subsequently. Microsoft software and systems prior to the Windows NT line are examples of this, because they use the OEM and ANSI code pages that do not make the distinction. Since the late 1990s, software and systems have adopted

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

as their preferred storage format; this trend has been improved by the widespread adoption of XML which default to

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of ...

but also provides a mechanism for labelling the encoding used. All current Microsoft products and application program interfaces use Unicode internally, but some applications continue to use the default encoding of the computer's 'locale' when reading and writing text data to files or standard output. Therefore, files may still be encountered that are legible and intelligible in one part of the world but unintelligible mojibake in another.

UTF-8, UTF-16

Microsoft adopted a Unicode encoding (first the now-obsolete UCS-2, which was then Unicode's only encoding), i.e. UTF-16 for all its

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s from Windows NT onwards, but now additionally supports and recommends using

(aka CP_UTF8). UTF-16 uniquely encodes all Unicode characters in the

Basic Multilingual Plane In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecim ...

(BMP) using 16 bits but the remaining Unicode (e.g. emojis) is encoded with a 32-bit (four byte) code while the rest of the industry ( Unix-like systems and the web), and now Microsoft chose

(which uses one byte for the 7-bit

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

character set, two or three bytes for other characters in the BMP, and four bytes for the remainder). Since Windows 10 version 1803, Windows machines can be configured to allow UTF-8 as the "ANSI" and OEM codepage.

List

The following Windows code pages exist:

Windows-125x series

These nine code pages are all extended ASCII 8-bit SBCS encodings, and were designed by Microsoft for use as ANSI codepages on Windows. They are commonly known by their IANA-registered names as windows-<number>, but are also sometimes called cp<number>, "cp" for "code page". They are all used as ANSI code pages; Windows-1258 is also used as an OEM code page. The Windows-125x series includes nine of the ANSI code pages, and mostly covers scripts from

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located enti ...

and

West Asia Western Asia, West Asia, or Southwest Asia, is the westernmost subregion of the larger geographical region of Asia, as defined by some academics, UN bodies and other institutions. It is almost entirely a part of the Middle East, and includes A ...

with the addition of

Vietnam Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making it ...

. System encodings for Thai and for East Asian languages were numbered to match similar IBM code pages and are used as both ANSI and OEM code pages; these are covered in following sections.

DOS code pages

These are also ASCII-based. Most of these are included for use as OEM code pages; code page 874 is also used as an ANSI code page. * 437 – IBM PC US, 8-bit SBCS extended ASCII. Known as OEM-US, the encoding of the primary built-in font of VGA graphics cards. *

708 __NOTOC__ Year 708 ( DCCVIII) was a leap year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. The denomination 708 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar e ...

– Arabic, extended ISO 8859-6 (ASMO 708) * 720 – Arabic, retaining box drawing characters in their usual locations * 737 – "MS-DOS Greek". Retains all box drawing characters. More popular than 869. * 775 – "MS-DOS Baltic Rim" * 850 – "MS-DOS Latin 1". Full (re-arranged) repertoire of

. *

852 __NOTOC__ Year 852 ( DCCCLII) was a leap year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * March 4 – Trpimir I, duke ('' knez'') of Croatia, and founder of the Trpimi ...

– "MS-DOS Latin 2" *

855 __NOTOC__ Year 855 ( DCCCLV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * November 20 – Theoktistos, co-regent of the Empire on behalf of ...

– "MS-DOS Cyrillic". Mainly used for

South Slavic languages The South Slavic languages are one of three branches of the Slavic languages. There are approximately 30 million speakers, mainly in the Balkans. These are separated geographically from speakers of the other two Slavic branches (West and East) ...

. Includes (re-arranged) repertoire of ISO-8859-5. Not to be confused with cp866. * 857 – "MS-DOS Turkish" * 858 – Western European with euro sign *

860 __NOTOC__ Year 860 ( DCCCLX) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * June 18 – Byzantine–Rus' War: A fleet of about 200 Rus' vessel ...

– "MS-DOS Portuguese" * 861 – "MS-DOS Icelandic" *

862 __NOTOC__ Year 862 ( DCCCLXII) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * The Varangians (called Rus'), under the leadership of Rurik, a Viking chieft ...

– "MS-DOS Hebrew" * 863 – "MS-DOS French Canada" * 864 – Arabic * 865 – "MS-DOS Nordic" *

866 __NOTOC__ Year 866 ( DCCCLXVI) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * April 21 – Bardas, the regent of the Byzantine Empire, is murd ...

– "MS-DOS Cyrillic Russian", cp866. Sole purely OEM code page (rather than ANSI or both) included as a legacy encoding in WHATWG Encoding Standard for HTML5. *

869 __NOTOC__ Year 869 ( DCCCLXIX) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * Summer – Emperor Basil I allies with the Frankish emperor L ...

– "MS-DOS Greek 2", IBM869. Full (re-arranged) repertoire of ISO 8859-7. * 874 – Thai, also used as the ANSI code page, extends ISO 8859-11 (and therefore TIS-620) with a few additional characters from Windows-1252. Corresponds to IBM code page 1162 (IBM-874 is similar but has different extensions).

East Asian multi-byte code pages

These often differ from the IBM code pages of the same number: code pages 932, 949 and 950 only partly match the IBM code pages of the same number, while the number 936 was used by IBM for another Simplified Chinese encoding which is now deprecated and Windows-951, as part of a kludge, is unrelated to IBM-951. IBM equivalent code pages are given in the second column. Code pages 932, 936, 949 and 950/951 are used as both ANSI and OEM code pages on the locales in question. A few further multiple-byte code pages are supported for decoding or encoding using operating system libraries, but not used as either sort of system encoding in any locale.

EBCDIC code pages

* 37 – IBM EBCDIC US-Canada, 8-bit SBCS * 500 – Latin 1 * 870 – IBM870 * 875 – cp875 * 1026 – EBCDIC Turkish * 1047 – IBM01047 – Latin 1 * 1140 – IBM01141 * 1141 – IBM01141 * 1142 – IBM01142 * 1143 – IBM01143 * 1144 – IBM01144 * 1145 – IBM01145 * 1146 – IBM01146 * 1147 – IBM01147 * 1148 – IBM01148 * 1149 – IBM01149 * 20273 – EBCDIC Germany * 20277 – EBCDIC Denmark/Norway * 20278 – EBCDIC Finland/Sweden * 20280 – EBCDIC Italy * 20284 – EBCDIC Latin America/Spain * 20285 – EBCDIC United Kingdom * 20290 – EBCDIC Japanese * 20297 – EBCDIC France * 20420 – EBCDIC Arabic * 20423 – EBCDIC Greek * 20424 – x-EBCDIC-KoreanExtended * 20833 – Korean * 20838 – EBCDIC Thai * 20924 – IBM00924 – IBM EBCDIC Latin 1/Open System (1047 + Euro symbol) * 20871 – EBCDIC Icelandic * 20880 – EBCDIC Cyrillic * 20905 – EBCDIC Turkish * 21025 – EBCDIC Cyrillic * 21027 – Japanese EBCDIC (incomplete, deprecated)

Unicode-related code pages

1200 Events By place Europe * Spring – Boniface I, marquis of Montferrat, sends envoys to Venice, Genoa and other city-states to negotiate a contract for transport to the Levant. Meanwhile, Boniface and various nobles are mustering ...

–

(BMP of ISO 10646, UTF-16LE). Available only to managed applications. *

1201 Year 1201 ( MCCI) was a common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. Events By place Byzantine Empire * July 31 – John Komnenos the Fat, a Byzantine aristocrat, attempts to usurp ...

–

(

UTF-16BE UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid code points of Unicode (in fact this number of code points is dictated by the design of UTF-16). The encoding is variable-length, as cod ...

). Available only to managed applications. * 12000 – UTF-32. Available only to managed applications. * 12001 – UTF-32. Big-endian. Available only to managed applications. * 65000 –

( UTF-7) * 65001 –

(

)

Macintosh compatibility code pages

10000 10,000 (ten thousand) is the natural number following 9,999 and preceding 10,001. Name Many languages have a specific word for this number: in Ancient Greek it is (the etymological root of the word myriad in English), in Aramaic , in Hebrew ...

– Apple Macintosh Roman * 10001 – Apple Macintosh Japanese * 10002 – Apple Macintosh Chinese (traditional) (BIG-5) * 10003 – Apple Macintosh Korean * 10004 – Apple Macintosh Arabic * 10005 – Apple Macintosh Hebrew * 10006 – Apple Macintosh Greek * 10007 – Apple Macintosh Cyrillic * 10008 – Apple Macintosh Chinese (simplified) (GB 2312) * 10010 – Apple Macintosh Romanian * 10017 – Apple Macintosh Ukrainian * 10021 – Apple Macintosh Thai * 10029 – Apple Macintosh Roman II / Central Europe * 10079 – Apple Macintosh Icelandic * 10081 – Apple Macintosh Turkish * 10082 – Apple Macintosh Croatian

ISO 8859 code pages

* 28591 –

– Latin-1 (IBM equivalent: 819) * 28592 – ISO-8859-2 – Latin-2 * 28593 –

ISO-8859-3 ISO/IEC 8859-3:1999, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 3: Latin alphabet No. 3'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1988. I ...

– Latin-3 or South European * 28594 – ISO-8859-4 – Latin-4 or North European * 28595 – ISO-8859-5 – Latin/Cyrillic * 28596 – ISO-8859-6 – Latin/Arabic * 28597 –

ISO-8859-7 ISO/IEC 8859-7:2003, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 7: Latin/Greek alphabet'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. I ...

– Latin/Greek * 28598 – ISO-8859-8 – Latin/Hebrew * 28599 –

ISO-8859-9 ISO/IEC 8859-9:1999, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 9: Latin alphabet No. 5'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1989 ...

– Latin-5 or Turkish * 28600 –

ISO-8859-10 ISO/IEC 8859-10:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 10: Latin alphabet No. 6'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 199 ...

– Latin-6 * 28601 – ISO-8859-11 – Latin/Thai * 28602 –

ISO-8859-12 ISO/IEC 8859-12 would have been part 12 of the ISO/IEC 8859 character encoding standard series. ISO 8859-12 was originally proposed to support the Celtic languages. ISO 8859-12 was later slated for Latin/Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , San ...

– ''reserved for Latin/Devanagari but abandoned'' (not supported) * 28603 – ISO-8859-13 – Latin-7 or Baltic Rim * 28604 –

ISO-8859-14 ISO/IEC 8859-14:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 14: Latin alphabet No. 8 (Celtic)'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published ...

– Latin-8 or Celtic * 28605 – ISO-8859-15 – Latin-9 * 28606 –

ISO-8859-16 ISO/IEC 8859-16:2001, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 16: Latin alphabet No. 10'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 2001 ...

– Latin-10 or South-Eastern European * 38596 – ISO-8859-6- – Latin/Arabic (logical bidirectional order) * 38598 – ISO-8859-8- – Latin/Hebrew (logical bidirectional order)

ITU-T code pages

* 20105 – 7-bit IA5

IRV IRV or Irv or ''variant'', may refer to: *Instant-runoff voting, a type of ranked preferential voting counting method used in single-seat elections with more than two candidates *Irvine railway station, North Ayrshire, Scotland (National Rail stat ...

(Western European) * 20106 – 7-bit IA5 German (DIN 66003) * 20107 – 7-bit IA5 Swedish (SEN 850200 C) * 20108 – 7-bit IA5 Norwegian (NS 4551-2) * 20127 – 7-bit US-ASCII * 20261 – T.61 (T.61-8bit) * 20269 – ISO-6937

KOI8 code pages

* 20866 – Russian – KOI8-R * 21866 – Ukrainian – KOI8-U (or KOI8-RU in some versions)

Problems arising from the use of code pages

Microsoft strongly recommends using Unicode in modern applications, but many applications or data files still depend on the legacy code pages. * Programs need to know what code page to use in order to display the contents of (pre-Unicode) files correctly. If a program uses the wrong code page it may show text as mojibake. * The code page in use may differ between machines, so (pre-Unicode) files created on one machine may be unreadable on another. * Data is often improperly tagged with the code page, or not tagged at all, making determination of the correct code page to read the data difficult. * These Microsoft code pages differ to various degrees from some of the standards and other vendors' implementations. This isn't a Microsoft issue ''per se'', as it happens to all vendors, but the lack of consistency makes interoperability with other systems unreliable in some cases. * The use of code pages limits the set of characters that may be used. * Characters expressed in an unsupported code page may be converted to question marks (?) or other replacement characters, or to a simpler version (such as removing accents from a letter). In either case, the original character may be lost.

References

External links

National Language Support (NLS) API Reference
Table showing ANSI and OEM codepages per language (from web-archive since Microsoft removed the original page)
IANA Charset Name Registrations

Unicode mapping table for Windows code pages

Unicode mappings of windows code pages with "best fit"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Windows Code Page