Windows-1252

MIME / IANA	windows-1252[1]
Alias(es)	cp1252 (code page 1252)
Languages	All supported byISO/IEC 8859-1 plus full support for French[a] and Finnish andligature forms forEnglish; e.g. Danish(except for arare exceptional letter), Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, German (missing uppercaseẞ[b]), Icelandic, Faroese, Luxembourgish, Albanian, Estonian, Swahili, Tswana, Catalan, Basque, Occitan,Rotokas, Toki Pona, Lojban, Romansh, Dutch (except the IJ/ij character, substituted byIJ/ij orÿ), and Slovene (except theč character, substituted byç). Some languages lack their standard quotation marks (such as German „quotes“).
Created by	Microsoft
Standard	WHATWG Encoding Standard
Classification	extended ASCII,Windows-125x
Extends	ISO 8859-1 (excluding C1 controls)
Transforms / Encodes	ISO 8859-15
Succeeded by	Unicode (UTF-8,UTF-16)

Windows-1252 orCP-1252 (Windows code page 1252) is alegacy single-bytecharacter encoding^[2] that is used by default (as the "ANSI code page") inMicrosoft Windows throughout theAmericas,Western Europe,Oceania, and much ofAfrica.^[3]

Initially the same asISO 8859-1, it began to diverge starting inWindows 2.0 by adding additional characters in the 0x80 to 0x9F (hex) range (the ISO standards reserve this range forC1 control codes). Notable additional characters includecurly quotation marks and all printable characters fromISO 8859-15.

It is the most-used single-byte character encoding in the world. Although almost allwebsites now use the multi-byte character encodingUTF-8, as of February 2026^[update], 0.9%^[4] of websites declaredISO 8859-1 which is treated as Windows-1252 by all modern browsers (as required by theHTML5 standard^[5]), plus 0.3% declared Windows-1252 directly,^[4][6] for a total of 1.2%. Some countries or languages show a higher usage than the global average, in 2025 Brazil according to website use, use is at 2.2%,^[7] and in Germany at 2.1%^[8][9] (these are the sums of ISO-8859-1 and CP-1252 declarations).

It is known to Windows by thecode page number 1252, and by theIANA-approved name "windows-1252".

Historically, the phrase "ANSI Code Page" was used in Windows to refer to non-DOS encodings; the intention was that most of these would beANSI standards such asISO-8859-1. Even though Windows-1252 was the first and by far most popular code page named so in Microsoft Windows parlance, the code page has never been an ANSI standard. Microsoft explains, "The term ANSI as used to signify Windows code pages is a historical reference, but is nowadays a misnomer that continues to persist in the Windows community."^[10]

LaTeX can input Windows-1252 by usinginputenc.sty with parameteransinew (and more recentlycp1252).^[11][12]

IBM uses code page 1252 (CCSID 1252 andeuro sign extended CCSID 5348) for Windows-1252.^[13][14][15]

It is called "WE8MSWIN1252" byOracle Database.^[16]

• The first version of the codepage was used in MicrosoftWindows 1.0. It matched the ISO-8859-1 standard (including leaving code points 0xD7 and 0xF7 undefined, as they were not in the standard at that time).
• The second version of the codepage was introduced in MicrosoftWindows 2.0. In this version, code points 0xD7, 0xF7, 0x91, and 0x92 are defined.
• The third version of the codepage was introduced in MicrosoftWindows 3.1. It defined all code points used in the final version except theeuro sign and theZ with caron character pair.
• The final version (shown below) was introduced in MicrosoftWindows 98.

Starting in the 1990s, manyMicrosoft products that could produce HTML included Windows-1252-exclusive characters, but marked theencoding as ISO-8859-1, ASCII, or undeclared.^{[citation needed]} Characters exclusive to Windows-1252 would render incorrectly on non-Windows operating systems (often as question marks).^[17][18] In particular, typographers' quotes—curly variants of the standard straightapostrophes andquotation marks in US-ASCII—were commonly used in files produced in Windows applications such asMicrosoft Word due to thesmart quotes feature, which can automatically convert straight apostrophes and quotation marks to the curly variants.^[19] To fix this, by 2000 most web browsers and e-mail clients treated the charsets ISO-8859-1 and US-ASCII as Windows-1252^{[citation needed]}—this behavior is now required by the HTML5 specification.^[5] Undeclared charsets in HTML are also assumed to be Windows-1252.^[20][21]

AlthoughWindows NT supportedUnicode and attempted to encourage programs to use it, it only provided the 16-bit code units ofUCS-2/UTF-16, despite the existing support for other multibyte character encodings such asShift-JIS. As many applications preferred to use 8-bit strings, Windows-1252 remained the most popular encoding on Windows.^{[citation needed]}UTF-8 has been supported sinceWindows 10 so this is gradually changing.^{[citation needed]}

The following table shows Windows-1252. Differences fromISO-8859-1 have theUnicodecode point number below the character, based on the Unicode.org mapping of Windows-1252 with "best fit". A tooltip, generally available only when one points to the immediate right of the character, shows the Unicode code point name and the decimalAlt code.

  According to the information on Microsoft's and the Unicode Consortium's websites, positions 81, 8D, 8F, 90, and 9D are unused; however, the Windows APIMultiByteToWideChar maps these to the correspondingC1 control codes. The "best fit" mapping documents this behavior, too.^[22]

TheOS/2 operating system supports an encoding by the name ofCode page 1004 (CCSID 1004) or "Windows Extended".^[27][28] This mostly matches code page 1252, with the exception of certainC0 control characters being replaced bydiacritic characters.

There is a rarely used, but useful, graphics extended code page 1252 where codes 0x00 to 0x1f allow for box drawing as used in applications such as MSDOS Edit and Codeview. One of the applications to use this code page was an Intel Corporation Install/Recovery disk image utility from mid/late 1995. These programs were written for its P6 User Test Program machines (US example^[33]). It was used exclusively in its then EMEA region (Europe, Middle East & Africa). In time the programs were changed to usecode page 850.

• Latin script in Unicode
• Unicode
• Universal Coded Character Set
  • European Unicode subset (DIN 91379)
• UTF-8
• Western Latin character sets (computing)
• Windows-1250
• Windows code pages
• ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2
• Extended ASCII

• Microsoft's code charts for Windows-1252 ("Code Page 1252 Windows Latin 1 (ANSI)")
• Unicode mapping table andcode page definition with best fit mappings for Windows-1252

• Windows code pages
• Computer-related introductions in 1985

• All articles that may contain original research
• Articles that may contain original research from June 2024
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles containing potentially dated statements from February 2026
• All articles containing potentially dated statements
• All articles with unsourced statements
• Articles with unsourced statements from December 2023
• Articles with unsourced statements from January 2025
• Articles with unsourced statements from October 2019