jiveturtle

Code pages are necessary because ANSI files only have 8 bits to display a character (char). This means there are only 256 possible characters--not nearly enough for all languages of the world. The American charset needs only 128 different chars = 7-bit. Because 7-bit was a bit inefficient for computers, this led to the need for another bit; thus, currently, another 128 possibilities are available to display chars. On MS-DOS systems, some of these bits have been used for drawing boxes and lines. With Windows, these boxes and lines have been removed from the charsets and more foreign chars have been added. For the most Western languages like English, French, German, and others, these additional chars work efficiently. For example, the German charset needs only seven extra chars to the US charset - leaving enough space for special chars from Spain, Norway, and so forth. However, for certain charsets, such as Cyrillic charsets, the space was not big enough. Codepages fill that gap. A code ...