Windows1252

Windows-1252, also known as CP-1252, is an 8-bit single-byte character encoding used by Microsoft Windows to represent Western European languages. It maps each of the 256 possible byte values to a character, with the ASCII range 0x00–0x7F preserved.

In Windows-1252, the byte values 0x80–0x9F are assigned to printable characters and punctuation rather than the control codes found in ISO/IEC 8859-1. For example, 0x80 encodes the euro sign (€), 0x93 and 0x94 yield left and right quotation marks, and 0x96–0x97 provide en and em dashes. The 0xA0–0xFF range largely mirrors ISO-8859-1, mapping to common Latin-1 letters and punctuation, with a few differences in certain positions.

History and usage: Windows-1252 originated with Microsoft as a Western European code page and became the de facto default encoding for Windows in many environments. It is common in legacy documents, emails, and web pages that predate Unicode. Since the rise of Unicode and UTF-8, its use has declined, but CP1252 remains in legacy data and some systems.

Compatibility and issues: CP1252 is distinct from other Windows code pages such as Windows-1251 and Windows-1250, and from ISO-8859-1. If bytes encoded in CP1252 are misinterpreted as ISO-8859-1 or as UTF-8, mojibake can occur. Modern software typically stores text internally as Unicode and converts to CP1252 only for compatibility with legacy data or interfaces.

Encoding and mapping: The Windows-1252 mapping to Unicode is defined by Microsoft and included in the Unicode standard. In Unicode terms, most CP1252 code points map directly to U+0000–U+00FF, with the euro sign at U+20AC and other punctuation mapped accordingly.