Code page 850

Code page 850 (CCSID 850) (also known as CP 850, IBM 00850, OEM 850, DOS Latin 1) is a code page used under DOS 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 (e.g. in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Canada), whilst other English-speaking locales (like the United States) default to 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 (all characters from ISO 8859-1 are included). 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. After the DOS era, successor operating systems largely replaced code page 850 with Windows-1252, later UCS-2 and UTF-16, and finally UTF-8. However, legacy applications, especially command-line programs, may still depend on support for older code pages.