Windows-1252
How Windows-1252 works
Windows-1252 (CP1252) is Microsoft's Western European encoding, nearly identical to ISO-8859-1 but filling the 128-159 gap with 27 additional characters: curly quotes (“ ” ‘ ’), the euro sign (€), trademark (™), bullet (•), and ellipsis (…). These are the characters that turn into garbled sequences like – when a CP1252 file is misread as UTF-8.
Despite never being an official ISO standard, CP1252 became the de facto encoding for English-language web content before UTF-8 took over. HTML5 officially mandates that any document labeled "ISO-8859-1" be parsed as Windows-1252, acknowledging decades of mislabeling. Compare CP1252 vs ISO-8859-1 to see the exact 27 positions that differ. View the full CP1252 table or see how it relates to other Windows encodings in the code pages comparison.
Despite never being an official ISO standard, CP1252 became the de facto encoding for English-language web content before UTF-8 took over. HTML5 officially mandates that any document labeled "ISO-8859-1" be parsed as Windows-1252, acknowledging decades of mislabeling. Compare CP1252 vs ISO-8859-1 to see the exact 27 positions that differ. View the full CP1252 table or see how it relates to other Windows encodings in the code pages comparison.