Code page
Code page in character encoding
A code page is a specific mapping of 256 byte values to characters, used before Unicode became standard. IBM introduced the concept for the PC: CP437 for the US, CP850 for Western Europe, CP866 for Russian. Microsoft continued with its own series: CP1252 for Western, CP1250 for Central European, CP1251 for Cyrillic.
The fundamental problem with code pages: you can only use one at a time. A document in CP1251 (Russian) cannot contain Japanese characters, and vice versa. If you guess the wrong code page when reading a file, every byte above 127 maps to the wrong character. This limitation is exactly what Unicode solves. Browse all supported character sets or compare two encodings side by side.
The fundamental problem with code pages: you can only use one at a time. A document in CP1251 (Russian) cannot contain Japanese characters, and vice versa. If you guess the wrong code page when reading a file, every byte above 127 maps to the wrong character. This limitation is exactly what Unicode solves. Browse all supported character sets or compare two encodings side by side.