A Brief Overview

Windows-1252: The Legacy Character Encoding of Microsoft Windows

A Brief Overview

Windows-1252, also known as CP-1252 or Windows code page 1252, is a legacy single-byte character encoding that was used by default in Microsoft Windows. It is an extension of the original ASCII character set, containing numbers, upper and lowercase English letters, and additional characters for various European languages.

Character Representation

In Windows-1252, each character is assigned a unique binary code that corresponds to its position in the character set. This allows for efficient representation and processing of text data. However, its single-byte nature limits the number of characters that can be represented to 256.

Use in HTML Files

Changing from ANSI (Windows-1252) to UTF-8, a more modern encoding, approximately doubles the size of HTML files. This is because UTF-8 uses multiple bytes to represent characters, accommodating a wider range of languages and symbols.