Windows-1252

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Windows-1252, sometimes called incorrectly "ANSI". Blue dots indicate unused or control characters

Windows-1252 or CP-1252 is a character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows in English and some other Western languages. It is one version within the group of Windows code pages. In LaTeX packages, it is referred to as ansinew.

Details

The encoding is a superset of ISO 8859-1, but differs from the IANA's ISO-8859-1 by using displayable characters rather than control characters in the 80 to 9F (hex) range. It is known to Windows by the code page number 1252, and by the IANA-approved name "windows‑1252". This code page also contains all the printable characters that are in ISO 8859-15 (though some are mapped to different code points).

It is very common to mislabel Windows-1252 text with the charset label ISO-8859-1. A common result was that all the quotes and apostrophes (produced by "smart quotes" in Microsoft software) were replaced with question marks or boxes on non-Windows operating systems, making text difficult to read. Most modern web browsers and e-mail clients treat the MIME charset ISO-8859-1 as Windows-1252 in order to accommodate such mislabeling. This is now standard behavior in the draft HTML 5 specification, which requires that documents advertised as ISO-8859-1 actually be parsed with the Windows-1252 encoding.¹

Historically, the phrase "ANSI code page" (ACP) is used in Windows to refer to various code pages considered as native. The intention was that most of these would be ANSI standards such as ISO-8859-1. Even though Windows-1252 was the first and by far most popular code page named so in Microsoft Windows parlance, the code page has never been an ANSI standard. Microsoft now states that "The term ANSI as used to signify Windows code pages is a historical reference, but is nowadays a misnomer that continues to persist in the Windows community."²

Codepage layout

The following table shows Windows-1252. Each character is shown with its Unicode equivalent and its decimal code.

Microsoft cites Unicode mappings of Windows-1252 with "best fit",³ which also includes the five unmapped C1 code points as well as code points that map to 1252 in a lossy fashion.

Legend: yellow cells are control characters, blue cells are punctuation, purple cells are numbers, green cells are ASCII letters, and tan cells are international letters. Differences from ISO-8859-1 are marked with thick green borders.

According to the information on Microsoft's and the Unicode Consortium's websites, positions 81, 8D, 8F, 90, and 9D are unused. However, the Windows API call for converting from code pages to Unicode^which? maps these to the corresponding C1 control codes. The euro character at position 80 was not present in earlier versions of this code page, nor were the S and Z with caron (háček).

See also

• Western Latin character sets (computing)

External links

• Windows 1252 reference chart
• IANA Charset Name Registration
• Unicode mapping table for Windows 1252
• Unicode mappings of windows 1252 with "best fit"

References

v d e Character encodings Character sets Early telecommunications ASCII ISO/IEC 646 ISO/IEC 6937 T.61 sixbit code pages Baudot code Morse code Chinese telegraph code ISO/IEC 8859 -1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9 -10 -11 -12 -13 -14 -15 -16 Bibliographic use ANSEL ISO 5426 / 5426-2 / 5427 / 5428 / 6438 / 6861 / 6862 / 10585 / 10586 / 10754 / 11822 MARC-8 National standards ArmSCII CNS 11643 GOST 10859 GB 2312 HKSCS ISCII JIS X 0201 JIS X 0208 JIS X 0212 JIS X 0213 KPS 9566 KS X 1001 PASCII TIS-620 TSCII VISCII YUSCII EUC CN JP KR TW ISO/IEC 2022 CN JP KR CCCII MacOS codepages ("scripts") Arabic CentralEurRoman ChineseSimp / EUC-CN ChineseTrad / Big5 Croatian Cyrillic Devanagari Dingbats Farsi Greek Gujarati Gurmukhi Hebrew Icelandic Japanese / ShiftJIS Korean / EUC-KR Roman Romanian Symbol Thai / TIS-620 Turkish Ukrainian DOS codepages 437 720 737 775 850 852 855 857 858 860 861 862 863 864 865 866 869 Kamenický Mazovia MIK Iran System Windows codepages 874 / TIS-620 932 / ShiftJIS 936 / GBK 949 / EUC-KR 950 / Big5 1250 1251 1252 1253 1254 1255 1256 1257 1258 1361 54936 / GB18030 EBCDIC codepages 37/1140 273/1141 277/1142 278/1143 280/1144 284/1145 285/1146 297/1147 420/16804 424/12712 500/1148 838/1160 871/1149 875/9067 930/1390 933/1364 937/1371 935/1388 939/1399 1025/1154 1026/1155 1047/924 1112/1156 1122/1157 1123/1158 1130/1164 JEF KEIS Platform specific ATASCII CDC display code DEC-MCS DEC Radix-50 Fieldata GSM 03.38 HP roman8 PETSCII TI calculator character sets WISCII ZX Spectrum character set Unicode / ISO/IEC 10646 UTF-8 UTF-16/UCS-2 UTF-32/UCS-4 UTF-7 UTF-1 UTF-EBCDIC GB 18030 SCSU BOCU-1 Miscellaneous codepages APL Cork HZ IBM code page 1133 KOI8 TRON Related topics control character (C0 C1) CCSID Character encodings in HTML charset detection Han unification ISO 6429/IEC 6429/ANSI X3.64 mojibake