Kódoldalakkal

Kódoldalakkal, also known as code pages, are character encoding schemes historically used in Microsoft Windows operating systems. They are primarily used to represent text in various languages and scripts. Unlike the more modern Unicode standard, code pages are typically limited to a fixed number of characters, often 256, organized into a 16x16 grid. This limitation means that a single code page can only represent a specific set of characters, and switching between different languages or character sets often requires using a different code page.

The concept of code pages arose from the need to support a wide range of characters for different languages while maintaining compatibility with older, 8-bit character encoding systems. Each code page defines a mapping between byte values and characters. For example, code page 437 was the original IBM PC character set, primarily for English. Code page 1252 is a Western European extension of code page 437, adding characters like the Euro symbol and accented letters. Asian languages often required separate code pages, such as code page 932 for Japanese Shift JIS.

The primary drawback of code pages is their limited scope. They cannot represent all the characters used in the world's languages simultaneously, leading to issues when exchanging documents or data between systems using different code pages. This interoperability problem was a major driver for the adoption of Unicode, which aims to provide a single, universal character set for all written languages. While code pages are still present in some legacy systems and applications, modern software development strongly favors Unicode (e.g., UTF-8) for its comprehensive character support and global compatibility.