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Sets of characters used in the 1980s & 90s
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 Windows code pages were gradually superseded when Unicode was implemented in Windows,[citation needed] although they are still supported both within Windows and other platforms, and still apply when Alt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.
Current Windows versions support Unicode, new Windows applications should use Unicode (UTF-8) and not 8-bit character encodings.[1]
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.
Windows-125x series Alias(es) ANSI (misnomer) Standard WHATWG Encoding Standard Extends ASCII Preceded by ISO 8859 Succeeded by UnicodeANSI code pages (officially called "Windows code pages"[2] after Microsoft accepted the former term being a misnomer[3]) 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,[3] 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".[4]
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:[3]
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]
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.
Early computer systems had limited storage and restricted the number of bits available to encode a character. Although earlier proprietary encodings had fewer, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) settled on seven bits: this was sufficient to encode a 96 member subset of the characters used in the US. As eight-bit bytes came to predominate, Microsoft (and others) expanded the repertoire to 224, to handle a variety of other uses such a box-drawing symbols. The need to provide precomposed characters for the Western European and South American markets required a different character set: Microsoft established the principle of code pages, one for each alphabet. 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. The code-page model was unable to handle this challenge.
Since the late 1990s, software and systems have adopted Unicode as their preferred character encoding format: Unicode is designed to handle millions of characters. All current Microsoft products and application program interfaces use Unicode internally,[citation needed] but some applications continue to use the default encoding[clarification needed] 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.
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.[5] 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).
The following Windows code pages exist:
Windows-125x series[edit]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[6] 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 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.
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.
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[26] 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[27] 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[28] 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) 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)[29] Conversion ID IBM Equivalent Description 37 Country Extended Code Page for US, Canada, Netherlands, Portugal, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand[30] 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,[31] now deprecated)[32] Macintosh compatibility code pages[edit] 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[edit] ID IBM Equivalent Description 20866 878 Russian – KOI8-R 21866 1167, 1168 Ukrainian – KOI8-U (or KOI8-RU in some versions)[41] Problems arising from the use of code pages[edit]Microsoft strongly recommends using Unicode in modern applications, but many applications or data files still depend on the legacy code pages.
The term "ANSI" as used to signify Windows code pages is a historical reference, but is nowadays a misnomer that continues to persist in the Windows community. The source of this comes from the fact that the Windows code page 1252 was originally based on an ANSI draft—which became International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Standard 8859-1. "ANSI applications" are usually a reference to non-Unicode or code page–based applications.
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