Code page 850

Code page 850 character set with 9×14 glyphs, as usually rendered by Video Graphics Array (VGA)
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
v t e

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.

Character set

Each non-ASCII character appears with its equivalent Unicode code-point. Differences from code page 437 are limited to the second half of the table, the first half being the same.

Code page 858

In 1998, code page 858 (CCSID 858)^[11] (also known as CP 858, IBM 00858, OEM 858^[3]) was derived from this code page by changing code point 213 (D5_hex) from a dotless i ⟨ı⟩ to the euro sign ⟨€⟩ U+20AC.^[12][13][14] Unlike most code pages modified to support the euro sign, the generic currency sign at CF_hex was not chosen as the character to replace (compare ISO-8859-15 (from ISO-8859-1), code pages 808 (from 866), 848 (from 1125), 849 (from 1131) and 872 (from 855), ISO-IR-205 (from ISO-8859-4), ISO-IR-206 (from ISO-8859-13), and the changes to MacRoman and MacCyrillic).

Instead of adding support for the new code page 858, IBM's PC DOS 2000, also released in 1998, changed the definition of the existing code page 850 to what IBM called modified code page 850 to include the euro sign at code point 213.^{[15][16][17][18][19]} The reason for this might have been due to restrictions in MS-DOS/PC DOS, which limited .CPI files to 64 KB in size or about six codepages maximum. Adding support for codepage 858 might have meant to drop another (e.g. codepage 850) at the same time, which might not have been a viable solution at that time, given that some applications were hard-wired to use codepage 850. More recent IBM/MS products implemented codepage 858 under its own ID.

Code page 1108

Code page 1108 (DITROFF Base Compatibility) is an extension of this codepage which alters some code points in the range 0–32 from their definitions in Code page 437.^[20] DITROFF (device independent troff) is an intermediate format of the standard Unix text formatter Troff.

Code page 1109

Code page 1109 (DITROFF Specials Compatibility) contains characters not available in Code page 1108.^[21]