Code page 850

Code page 850
Code page 850 character set with 9×14 glyphs, as usually rendered by Video Graphics Array (VGA)
MIME / IANAIBM850
Alias(es)cp850, 850, csPC850Multilingual,[1] DOS Latin 1, OEM 850
Language(s)English, various others
ClassificationExtended ASCII, OEM code page
ExtendsUS-ASCII
Based onOEM-US
Transforms / EncodesISO/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 (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[a] 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]

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,[b] later UCS-2 and UTF-16,[c] and finally UTF-8. However, legacy applications, especially command-line programs, may still depend on support for older code pages.

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