Code page 850

Code page 850 character set with 9×14 glyphs, as usually rendered by EGA

Code page 850 (also known as CP 850, IBM 00850,^[1] OEM 850,^[2] DOS Latin 1^[3]) is a code page used under DOS in Western Europe. 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 (f.e. in the UK, Ireland, and Canada), whilst other English-speaking locales (like the USA) default to use the hardware code page 437.^[4]

Systems largely replaced code page 850 with, firstly, Windows-1252 (often mislabeled as ISO-8859-1), and later with UCS-2, and finally with UTF-16 (the NT line was natively Unicode from the start, but issues of development tool support and compatibility with Windows 9x kept most applications on the 8-bit code pages).

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, such as programs using Turbo Pascal.

In 1998, code page 858 was derived from this code page by changing code point 213 (D5_hex) from dotless i ‹ı› to the euro sign ‹€›.^[5] Despite this, IBM's PC DOS 2000, released in 1998, changed their definition of code page 850 to what they called modified code page 850 now including the euro sign at code point 213 instead of adding support for the new code page 858.^{[nb 1][6][7][8]}

Code page layout

The following table shows code page 850.^[2][9] Each character appears with its equivalent Unicode code-point and its decimal code-point. Only the second half of the table (code points 128–255) is shown, the first half (code points 0–127) being the same as ASCII; code points 1–31 and 127 (01–1F_hex and 7F_hex) may be either ASCII control characters or code page 437 graphics, depending on context.^[1]

Legend:

Alphabetic   Control character   Numeric digit   Punctuation

Extended punctuation   Graphic character   International   Undefined

Code page 850

	_0	_1	_2	_3	_4	_5	_6	_7	_8	_9	_A	_B	_C	_D	_E	_F
8_	Ç 00C7 128	ü 00FC 129	é 00E9 130	â 00E2 131	ä 00E4 132	à 00E0 133	å 00E5 134	ç 00E7 135	ê 00EA 136	ë 00EB 137	è 00E8 138	ï 00EF 139	î 00EE 140	ì 00EC 141	Ä 00C4 142	Å 00C5 143
9_	É 00C9 144	æ 00E6 145	Æ 00C6 146	ô 00F4 147	ö 00F6 148	ò 00F2 149	û 00FB 150	ù 00F9 151	ÿ 00FF 152	Ö 00D6 153	Ü 00DC 154	ø 00F8 155	£ 00A3 156	Ø 00D8 157	× 00D7 158	ƒ 0192 159
A_	á 00E1 160	í 00ED 161	ó 00F3 162	ú 00FA 163	ñ 00F1 164	Ñ 00D1 165	ª 00AA 166	º 00BA 167	¿ 00BF 168	® 00AE 169	¬ 00AC 170	½ 00BD 171	¼ 00BC 172	¡ 00A1 173	« 00AB 174	» 00BB 175
B_	░ 2591 176	▒ 2592 177	▓ 2593 178	│ 2502 179	┤ 2524 180	Á 00C1 181	Â 00C2 182	À 00C0 183	© 00A9 184	╣ 2563 185	║ 2551 186	╗ 2557 187	╝ 255D 188	¢ 00A2 189	¥ 00A5 190	┐ 2510 191
C_	└ 2514 192	┴ 2534 193	┬ 252C 194	├ 251C 195	─ 2500 196	┼ 253C 197	ã 00E3 198	Ã 00C3 199	╚ 255A 200	╔ 2554 201	╩ 2569 202	╦ 2566 203	╠ 2560 204	═ 2550 205	╬ 256C 206	¤ 00A4 207
D_	ð 00F0 208	Ð 00D0 209	Ê 00CA 210	Ë 00CB 211	È 00C8 212	ı 0131 213	Í 00CD 214	Î 00CE 215	Ï 00CF 216	┘ 2518 217	┌ 250C 218	█ 2588 219	▄ 2584 220	¦ 00A6 221	Ì 00CC 222	▀ 2580 223
E_	Ó 00D3 224	ß 00DF 225	Ô 00D4 226	Ò 00D2 227	õ 00F5 228	Õ 00D5 229	µ 00B5 230	þ 00FE 231	Þ 00DE 232	Ú 00DA 233	Û 00DB 234	Ù 00D9 235	ý 00FD 236	Ý 00DD 237	¯ 00AF 238	´ 00B4 239
F_	SHY 00AD 240	± 00B1 241	‗ 2017 242	¾ 00BE 243	¶ 00B6 244	§ 00A7 245	÷ 00F7 246	¸ 00B8 247	° 00B0 248	¨ 00A8 249	· 00B7 250	¹ 00B9 251	³ 00B3 252	² 00B2 253	■ 25A0 254	NBSP 00A0 255
	_0	_1	_2	_3	_4	_5	_6	_7	_8	_9	_A	_B	_C	_D	_E	_F

See also

• Western Latin character sets (computing)
• Hardware code page
• LMBCS-1

Notes

1. The reason for this might have been down to existing restrictions in the implementation of the codepage switching logic under MS-DOS/PC DOS, which limited .CPI files to 64 KB in size or about six codepages maximum, a limitation, which was circumvented in some OEM versions of MS-DOS, in Windows NT, and also does not exist in DR-DOS. Further, the parser in MS-DOS/PC DOS limits the number of possible country / codepage entries in COUNTRY.SYS files to a maximum of 146 or 438, a limitation non-existent in DR-DOS. So, 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.

References

1. "00850". Code pages by CPGID. IBM. Archived from the original on 2016-06-06. Retrieved 2016-06-06.
2. "OEM 850". Go Global Developer Center. Microsoft. Archived from the original on 2016-06-06. Retrieved 2016-06-06.
3. "Code Page 850 MS-DOS Latin 1". Developing International Software. Microsoft. Archived from the original on 2016-06-06. Retrieved 2016-06-06.
4. Paul, Matthias (1997-07-30). "II.16.iii. Landessprachliche Unterstützung - Landescodes und Keyboard-Kürzel" [II.16.iii. National language support - Country codes and keyboard layout IDs]. NWDOS-TIPs — Tips & Tricks rund um Novell DOS 7, mit Blick auf undokumentierte Details, Bugs und Workarounds [NWDOSTIPs — Tips & tricks for Novell DOS 7, with special focus on undocumented details, bugs and workarounds]. MPDOSTIP (e-book) (in German) (edition 3, release 157 ed.). Archived from the original on 2016-06-06. Retrieved 2016-06-06. (NB. NWDOSTIP.TXT is a comprehensive work on Novell DOS 7 and OpenDOS 7.01, including the description of many undocumented features and internals. It is part of the author's yet larger MPDOSTIP.ZIP collection maintained up to 2001 and distributed on many sites at the time. The provided link points to a HTML-converted older version of the NWDOSTIP.TXT file.)
5. "00858". Code pages by CPGID. IBM. Archived from the original on 2016-06-06. Retrieved 2016-06-06.
6. Paul, Matthias (2001-08-15). "Changing codepages in FreeDOS" (Technical design specification based on fd-dev post ). Archived from the original on 2016-06-06. Retrieved 2016-06-06. The new official ID for the Multilingual "codepage 850 with EURO SIGN" is 858, not 850. IBM will switch to use 858 instead of their 850 variant with future issues of their products. […] I can only guess why they didn't add 858 to their EGAx.CPI, COUNTRY.SYS, and KEYBOARD.SYS files in PC DOS 2000. Many third-party applications are designed to work with 850 and didn't know about 858 at the time PC DOS 2000 was released, so it's easier for everyone, but unfortunately it's not compatible. […] As explained above, COUNTRY.SYS and KEYBOARD.SYS contain only two codepage entries for a given country in Western issues of DOS. (In Arabic and Hebrew issues there can be up to 8 codepages for one country, in theory there is no limit below the range of allowed codepages 1..65534). […] The problem is that removing support for 850 might have caused compatibility problems with applications which are hard-wired to use 850. Adding 858 as a third choice to all the files would have increased the file and table sizes significantly. The COUNTRY.SYS file parser in MS-DOS/PC DOS IO.SYS/IBMBIO.COM sets aside a 6 Kb (for DOS 6) scratchpad to load all the info. This allows a maximum of 438 entries in a COUNTRY.SYS file to be accepted, otherwise you will get the message "COUNTRY.SYS too large.". The NLSFUNC parser does not have this limitation, and the file parsers in DR-DOS (kernel and NLSFUNC) also do not know of such a restriction. Older issues of MS-DOS/PC DOS even had a 2 Kb buffer for a maximum of 146 entries.
7. Paul, Matthias (2001-08-27). "Changing codepages in FreeDOS (follow-up)". Retrieved 2013-05-08. […] one could also create custom .CPI files in the traditional FONT style without difficulties, but you could only store up to […] six codepages in such a file if it should be useable by MS-DOS/PC DOS (some OEM issues and NT can handle files larger than 64 Kb, but MS-DOS/PC DOS can not).
8. Starikov, Yuri (2005-04-11). "15-летию Russian MS-DOS 4.01 посвящается" [15 Years of Russian MS-DOS 4.01] (in Russian). Archived from the original on 2016-06-06. Retrieved 2014-05-07.
9. "cp850_DOSLatin1 to Unicode table" (TXT). The Unicode Consortium. Archived from the original on 2016-06-06. Retrieved 2016-06-06.