Windows Code Page

Windows code pages are sets of characters or code pages (known as character encodings in other operating systems) used in Microsoft Windows from the 1980s and 1990s.

Windows code pages were gradually superseded when Unicode was implemented in Windows,[citation needed] although they are still supported both within Windows and other platforms, and still apply when Alt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

Windows-125x series
Alias(es)ANSI (misnomer)
StandardWHATWG Encoding Standard
ExtendsUS-ASCII
Preceded byISO 8859
Succeeded byUnicode
UTF-16 (in Win32 API)

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) 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, 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:

Microsoft assigned about twelve of the typography and business characters (including notably, the euro sign, €) in CP1252 to the code points 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.[citation needed]

OEM code page

The OEM code pages (original equipment manufacturer) are used by Win32 console applications, and by virtual DOS, and can be considered a holdover from DOS and the original IBM PC 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 diacritics, 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 characters and bytes: 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 subsequently led to much confusion. 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 as their preferred storage format; this trend has been improved by the widespread adoption of XML which default to UTF-8 but also provides a mechanism for labelling the encoding used. All current Microsoft products and application program interfaces use Unicode internally,[citation needed] 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.[citation needed] 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 systems from Windows NT onwards, but additionally supports UTF-8 (aka CP_UTF8) since Windows 10 version 1803. UTF-16 uniquely encodes all Unicode characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane (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 UTF-8 (which uses one byte for the 7-bit ASCII character set, two or three bytes for other characters in the BMP, and four bytes for the remainder).

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-, but are also sometimes called cp, "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 and West Asia with the addition of Vietnam. 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.

ID Description Relationship to ISO 8859 or other established encodings
1250 Latin 2 / Central European Similar to ISO-8859-2 but moves several characters, including multiple letters.
1251 Cyrillic Incompatible with both ISO-8859-5 and KOI-8.
1252 Latin 1 / Western European Superset of ISO-8859-1 (without C1 controls). Letter repertoire accordingly similar to CP850.
1253 Greek Similar to ISO 8859-7 but moves several characters, including a letter.
1254 Turkish Superset of ISO 8859-9 (without C1 controls).
1255 Hebrew Almost a superset of ISO 8859-8, but with two incompatible punctuation changes.
1256 Arabic Not compatible with ISO 8859-6; rather, OEM Code page 708 is an ISO 8859-6 (ASMO 708) superset.
1257 Baltic Not ISO 8859-4; the later ISO 8859-13 is closely related, but with some differences in available punctuation.
1258 Vietnamese (also OEM) Not related to VSCII or VISCII, uses fewer base characters with combining diacritics.

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 – 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 ISO 8859-1.
  • 852 – "MS-DOS Latin 2"
  • 855 – "MS-DOS Cyrillic". Mainly used for South Slavic languages. 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 – "MS-DOS Portuguese"
  • 861 – "MS-DOS Icelandic"
  • 862 – "MS-DOS Hebrew"
  • 863 – "MS-DOS French Canada"
  • 864 – Arabic
  • 865 – "MS-DOS Nordic"
  • 866 – "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 – "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.

ID Language Encoding IBM Equivalent Difference from IBM CCSID of same number Use
932 Japanese Shift JIS (Microsoft variant) 943 IBM-932 is also Shift JIS, has fewer extensions (but those extensions it has are in common), and swaps some variant Chinese characters (itaiji) for interoperability with earlier editions of JIS C 6226. ANSI/OEM (Japan)
936 Chinese (simplified) GBK 1386 IBM-936 is a different Simplified Chinese encoding with a different encoding method, which has been deprecated since 1993. ANSI/OEM (PRC, Singapore)
949 Korean Unified Hangul Code 1363 IBM-949 is also an EUC-KR superset, but with different (colliding) extensions. ANSI/OEM (Republic of Korea)
950 Chinese (traditional) Big5 (Microsoft variant) 1373 IBM-950 is also Big5, but includes a different subset of the ETEN extensions, adds further extensions with an expanded trail byte range, and lacks the Euro. ANSI/OEM (Taiwan, Hong Kong)
951 Chinese (traditional) including Cantonese Big5-HKSCS (2001 ed.) 5471 IBM-951 is the double-byte plane from IBM-949 (see above), and unrelated to Microsoft's internal use of the number 951. ANSI/OEM (Hong Kong, 98/NT4/2000/XP with HKSCS patch)
Windows Code Page 
Microsoft code pages for Chinese, Japanese and Korean usually do not correspond exactly, and sometimes do not correspond at all, to the IBM code pages of the same number.

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.

ID IBM Equivalent Language Encoding Use
1361 - Korean Johab (KS C 5601-1992 annex 3) Conversion
20000 - Chinese (traditional) An encoding of CNS 11643 Conversion
20001 - Chinese (traditional) TCA Conversion
20002 - Chinese (traditional) Big5 (ETEN variant) Conversion
20003 938 Chinese (traditional) IBM 5550 Conversion
20004 - Chinese (traditional) Teletext Conversion
20005 - Chinese (traditional) Wang Conversion
20932 954 (roughly) Japanese EUC-JP Conversion
20936 5479 Chinese (simplified) GB 2312 Conversion
20949, 51949 970 Korean Wansung (8-bit with ASCII, i.e. EUC-KR) Conversion

EBCDIC code pages

ID IBM Equivalent Description
37 Country Extended Code Page for US, Canada, Netherlands, Portugal, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand
500 Country Extended Code Page for Belgium, Canada and Switzerland
870 EBCDIC Latin-2
875 EBCDIC Greek
1026 EBCDIC Latin-5 (Turkish)
1047 Country Extended Code Page for Open Systems (POSIX)
1140 Euro-sign Country Extended Code Page for US, Canada, Netherlands, Portugal, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand
1141 Euro-sign Country Extended Code Page for Austria and Germany
1142 Euro-sign Country Extended Code Page for Denmark and Norway
1143 Euro-sign Country Extended Code Page for Finland and Sweden
1144 Euro-sign Country Extended Code Page for Italy
1145 Euro-sign Country Extended Code Page for Spain and Latin America
1146 Euro-sign Country Extended Code Page for UK
1147 Euro-sign Country Extended Code Page for France
1148 Euro-sign Country Extended Code Page for Belgium, Canada and Switzerland
1149 Euro-sign Country Extended Code Page for Iceland
20273 273 Country Extended Code Page for Germany
20277 277 Country Extended Code Page for Denmark/Norway
20278 278 Country Extended Code Page for Finland/Sweden
20280 280 Country Extended Code Page for Italy
20284 284 Country Extended Code Page for Latin America/Spain
20285 285 Country Extended Code Page for United Kingdom
20290 290 Japanese Katakana EBCDIC
20297 297 Country Extended Code Page for France
20420 420 EBCDIC Arabic
20423 423 EBCDIC Greek with Extended Latin
20424 - x-EBCDIC-KoreanExtended
20833 833 Korean EBCDIC for N-Byte Hangul
20838 838 EBCDIC Thai
20871 871 Country Extended Code Page for Iceland
20880 880 EBCDIC Cyrillic (DKOI)
20905 905 EBCDIC Latin-3 (Maltese, Esperanto and Turkish)
20924 924 EBCDIC Latin-9 (including Euro sign) for Open Systems (POSIX)
21025 1025 EBCDIC Cyrillic (DKOI) with section sign
21027 (1027) Japanese EBCDIC (an incomplete implementation of IBM code page 1027, now deprecated)
ID IBM Equivalent Description
1200 1202, 1203 Unicode (BMP of ISO 10646, UTF-16LE). Available only to managed applications.
1201 1200, 1201 Unicode (UTF-16BE). Available only to managed applications.
12000 1234, 1235 UTF-32. Available only to managed applications.
12001 1232, 1233 UTF-32. Big-endian. Available only to managed applications.
65000 - Unicode (UTF-7)
65001 1208, 1209 Unicode (UTF-8)

Macintosh compatibility code pages

ID IBM Equivalent Description
10000 1275 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 1280 Apple Macintosh Greek
10007 1283 Apple Macintosh Cyrillic
10008 - Apple Macintosh Chinese (simplified) (GB 2312)
10010 1285 Apple Macintosh Romanian
10017 - Apple Macintosh Ukrainian
10021 - Apple Macintosh Thai
10029 1282 Apple Macintosh Roman II / Central Europe
10079 1286 Apple Macintosh Icelandic
10081 1281 Apple Macintosh Turkish
10082 1284 Apple Macintosh Croatian

ISO 8859 code pages

ID IBM Equivalent Description
28591 819, 5100 ISO-8859-1 – Latin-1
28592 912 ISO-8859-2 – Latin-2
28593 913 ISO-8859-3 – Latin-3 or South European
28594 914 ISO-8859-4 – Latin-4 or North European
28595 915 ISO-8859-5 – Latin/Cyrillic
28596 - ISO-8859-6 – Latin/Arabic
28597 813, 4909, 9005 ISO-8859-7 – Latin/Greek (1987 edition, i.e. without euro sign, drachma sign or iota subscript)
28598 - ISO-8859-8 – Latin/Hebrew (visual order; 1988 edition, i.e. without LRM and RLM)
28599 920 ISO-8859-9 – Latin-5 or Turkish
28600 919 ISO-8859-10 – Latin-6 or Nordic
28601 - ISO-8859-11 – Latin/Thai
28602 - ISO-8859-12 – reserved for Latin/Devanagari but abandoned (not supported)
28603 921 ISO-8859-13 – Latin-7 or Baltic Rim
28604 - ISO-8859-14 – Latin-8 or Celtic
28605 923 ISO-8859-15 – Latin-9
28606 - ISO-8859-16 – Latin-10 or South-Eastern European
38596 1089 ISO-8859-6-I – Latin/Arabic (logical bidirectional order)
38598 916, 5012 ISO-8859-8-I – Latin/Hebrew (logical bidirectional order; 1988 edition, i.e. without LRM and RLM)

ITU-T code pages

ID IBM Equivalent Description
20105 1009 7-bit IA5 IRV (Western European)
20106 1011 7-bit IA5 German (DIN 66003)
20107 1018 7-bit IA5 Swedish (SEN 850200 C)
20108 1016 7-bit IA5 Norwegian (NS 4551-2)
20127 367 7-bit US-ASCII
20261 1036 T.61 (T.61-8bit)
20269 ? ISO-6937

KOI8 code pages

ID IBM Equivalent Description
20866 878 Russian – KOI8-R
21866 1167, 1168 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.

See also

  • AppLocale – a utility to run non-Unicode (code page-based) applications in a locale of the user's choice.

References

Tags:

Windows Code Page ANSI code pageWindows Code Page OEM code pageWindows Code Page HistoryWindows Code Page ListWindows Code Page Problems arising from the use of code pagesWindows Code PageAlt codeCharacter encodingCode pagesMicrosoft WindowsUnicode in Microsoft WindowsWikipedia:Citation needed

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