Code page 850
Computer character set for Latin scripts / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Code page 850 (CCSID 850) (also known as CP 850, IBM 00850,[2] OEM 850,[3] DOS Latin 1[4]) is a code page used under DOS operating systems[lower-alpha 1] in Western Europe.[5] Depending on the country setting and system configuration, code page 850 is the primary code page and default OEM code page in many countries, including various English-speaking locales (e.g. in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Canada), whilst other English-speaking locales (like the United States) default to the hardware code page 437.[6]
MIME / IANA | IBM850 |
---|---|
Alias(es) | cp850, 850, csPC850Multilingual,[1] DOS Latin 1, OEM 850 |
Language(s) | English, various others |
Classification | Extended ASCII, OEM code page |
Extends | US-ASCII |
Based on | OEM-US |
Transforms / Encodes | ISO/IEC 8859-1 (reordered) |
Other related encoding(s) | Code page 858 (PC DOS 2000's "modified code page 850"), code page 437 |
Code page 850 differs from code page 437 in that many of the box-drawing characters, Greek letters, and various symbols were replaced with additional Latin letters with diacritics, thus greatly improving support for Western European languages (all characters from ISO 8859-1 are included). At the same time, the changes frequently caused display glitches with programs that made use of the box-drawing characters to display a GUI-like surface in text mode.
After the DOS era, successor operating systems largely replaced code page 850 with Windows-1252,[lower-alpha 2] later UCS-2 and UTF-16,[lower-alpha 3] and finally UTF-8. However, legacy applications, especially command-line programs, may still depend on support for older code pages.