Windows Code Pages & Character Sets

Essential translation tables for seamless conversion between ANSI and Unicode environments.

How Code Pages Work

A Code Page acts as a mapping table that Windows utilizes to facilitate data conversion between older 8-bit ANSI encoding and the modern Unicode standard.

By default, Windows enables specific code page support based on the locales integrated into the system's run-time image. Each installed locale is defined by two primary encodings:

ANSI Code Page Used for graphical Windows-based applications.

OEM Code Page Used for legacy MS-DOS and console-based apps.

Note: When the system locale is modified, Windows automatically updates the default ANSI and OEM code pages to ensure character compatibility for the new region.

Quick Reference

In a modern development environment, Unicode (UTF-16/UTF-8) is the preferred standard. However, code pages remain critical for legacy database support, industrial automation, and localized printer output.

Supported Encodings

Technical Index

ID	Description / Language Support
437	Microsoft® MS-DOS® United States
850	MS-DOS Multilingual (Latin I)
932	Japanese Shift-JIS
936	Simplified Chinese (GBK)
950	Traditional Chinese (Big5)
1200	Unicode (ISO 10646)
1252	Windows 3.1 US (Western European)
20127	US ASCII
...	Various ISO 8859 & Region Specific Tables