Windows code page

ANSI 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.

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.)

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".

However, if included in a file transferred to a standards-compliant platform like Unix or MacOS, the information was invisible and potentially disruptive.

Early computer systems had limited storage and restricted the number of bits available to encode a character.

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.

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.

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.