CP1252

cp1252, also known as Windows-1252, is a single-byte character encoding used by Microsoft Windows to represent text in Western European languages. It encodes 256 code points, with one byte per character, suitable for English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, and others.

In cp1252, the range 0x00-0x7F corresponds to ASCII, while the 0x80-0x9F range is a set of printable characters rather than the control codes found in ISO-8859-1. This area includes symbols such as the euro sign (€) and various typographic punctuation and diacritic marks. The 0xA0-0xFF range contains Latin letters with diacritics and other Western European characters, used widely in those languages.

History and usage: cp1252 was developed as a Windows code page to support Western European text and became the de facto encoding for Windows environments for many years. It is still encountered in legacy files, web pages, and email data originating from Windows systems, but modern software tends to use Unicode encodings such as UTF-8.

Compatibility and mapping: cp1252 can be mapped to Unicode, enabling interoperability with UTF-8 and other Unicode-based systems. Caution is warranted when data is misinterpreted as ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) or vice versa, because the 0x80-0x9F range differs between these encodings, leading to issues with characters like the euro sign and smart quotes.

See also: Windows-1252 is one of several code pages used to encode Latin-script text; Unicode UTF-8 is now the preferred encoding for new data, though cp1252 remains relevant for legacy and Windows-based workflows.