Code page 850 is a code page that was used in western Europe, under systems such as DOS. It was also sometimes used on English DOS systems although CP437 was generally the default on those. It was largely replaced first with windows-1252 (often mislabeled as ISO-8859-1) and later by UCS-2 and finally UTF-16 (while the NT line was natively unicode from the start issues of development tool support and compatibility with windows 9x kept most applications on the 8 bit code pages). According to Microsoft, it is obsolete and unsupported.

CP850 differs from CP437 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).

A modification of CP850 is CP858, differing only in the character at position D5_HEX: a dotless-i (ı) in CP850, which is replaced with a euro sign (€) in CP858.

Code page layout

• The C0 control range (0x00–0x1F hex) is mapped to graphics characters. The codes can assume their original function as controls (as they still do—typing "echo", space, control-G and then Enter causes the PC speaker to emit a beep—even on the command prompt on Windows XP), but in display, for example in a screen editor like MS-DOS edit, they show as graphics. The graphics are various, such as smiling faces, card suits and musical notes. Code 0x7F, DEL, similarly shows as a graphic (a house).

See also

• Western Latin character sets (computing)

DOS code pages

Page de code 850 | Codepage 850 | CP850