Code page 437
What is Code page 437?
Code Page 437 shipped with the original IBM PC in 1981 as its built-in character set. It maps the standard 128 ASCII characters to positions 0-127, then fills 128-255 with box-drawing characters (single and double lines for TUI borders), accented letters for Western European languages, Greek letters, and mathematical symbols like infinity and square root.
The box-drawing characters at positions 176-223 are what gave DOS-era programs their distinctive look - Norton Commander, edit.com, and countless BBS interfaces were built from these glyphs. CP437 is still the default encoding in Windows Command Prompt and PowerShell console. Compare it against other encodings on our comparison page, or see the Windows code pages side-by-side reference.
The box-drawing characters at positions 176-223 are what gave DOS-era programs their distinctive look - Norton Commander, edit.com, and countless BBS interfaces were built from these glyphs. CP437 is still the default encoding in Windows Command Prompt and PowerShell console. Compare it against other encodings on our comparison page, or see the Windows code pages side-by-side reference.