Code page 850


Code page 850 is a code page used under DOS and Psion’s EPOC16 operating systems 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, whilst other English-speaking locales default to use the hardware code page 437.
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. 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.
In 1998, code page 858 was derived from this code page by changing code point 213 from a dotless i ‹ı› to the euro sign ‹€›. 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.
Systems largely replaced code page 850 with Windows-1252 which contains all same letters, and later with Unicode.

Character set

Each character appears with its equivalent Unicode code-point. Only the second half of the table is shown, the first half being the same as code page 437.