Windows code page: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 03:49, 23 January 2007

Revision as of 05:44, 12 April 2007

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[[Microsoft]] products and APIs use [[Unicode]] internally, but many applications and APIs continue to use the default [[character encodings| encoding]] of the computer's ''locale'' when reading and writing text data to files, files or standard output.

[[Microsoft]] uses two main groups of '''[[code pages]]''' in [[Microsoft Windows]] (known as [[character encodings]] in other operating systems). The [[original equipment manufacturer|OEM]] code pages are used in console windows and can be considered a holdover from [[DOS]] and the original [[IBM PC]] architecture. The [[ANSI]] code pages are used for non-[[Unicode]] applications using the Windows [[graphical user interface|GUI]]. Two single-byte, fixed-width code pages (874 for [[Thai language|Thai]] and 1258 for [[Vietnamese language|Vietnamese]]) and four multibyte [[CJK]] code pages ([[Shift JIS|932]], [[GBK|936]], [[Hangul|949]], [[Big5|950]]) are used as both ANSI and OEM code pages. Both ANSI and OEM code pages are [[extended ASCII]] code pages.

Initially, computer systems and sytem programming languages did not make a distinction between characters and bytes. This has lead to many confusions subsequently. Microsoft software and systems from the 1980s will tend to use the IBM-derived OEM '''code pages'''. Software and systems from the 1990s (pre-Unicode [[Microsoft Windows]] applications) will tend to use extended versions of the national or international standard sets, so-called ANSI. Since the the late 1990s, software and systems are increasingly adopting more direct encodings of [[Unicode]], in particular UTF-8 and UTF-16; this trend has been improved by by the widespread adoption of [[XML]] which provides a more adequate mechanism for labelling the encoding used.

[[Microsoft]] uses two main groups of '''[[code pages]]''' in [[Microsoft Windows]] (known as [[character encodings]] in other operating systems). The [[original equipment manufacturer|OEM]] code pages are used in console windows and can be considered a holdover from [[DOS]] and the original [[IBM PC]] architecture. The [[ANSI]] code pages are used for non-[[Unicode]] applications using the Windows [[graphical user interface|GUI]]. Two single-byte, fixed-width code pages (874 for [[Thai language|Thai]] and 1258 for [[Vietnamese language|Vietnamese]]) and four multibyte [[CJK]] code pages ([[Shift JIS|932]], [[GBK|936]], [[Hangul|949]], [[Big5|950]]) are used as both ANSI and OEM code pages. Both ANSI and OEM code pages are [[extended ASCII]] code pages.

Code page 1258 uses [[combining diacritic]]s, as Vietnamese requires more than 128 letter-diacritic combinations. This is in contrast to [[VISCII]], which replaces some of the [[C0 and C1 control codes|C0]] control codes.

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==Charts of single-byte code pages==

===ANSI===

Note: the code pages are called ANSI since they're are purportedly based on ANSI drafts submetted or intended for [[ANSI]].

ANSI hasand [[ISO]] have not standardized any of these code pages. (orInstead the draftstandard itsets isare basedthose on).of InsteadISO the draft was revised8859 and finalized as the ISOvarious 8859national standards<ref name="ms glossary">[http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/glossary.mspx Microsoft Glossary]</ref>.

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