CCSID

CCSID is an abbreviation used by IBM to mean "Coded Character Set Identifier". It is a 16-bit number that represents a specific encoding of a specific code page. For example, Unicode is a code page that has several encoding forms, like UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32.

Difference between a code page and a CCSID

The terms code page and CCSID are often used interchangeably, even though they are not synonymous. A code page may be only part of what makes up a CCSID. The following definitions, from IBM, help to illustrate this point, from glyph to CCSID and everything in between.

A glyph is the actual physical pattern of pixels or ink that shows up on a display or printout.

A character is a concept that covers all glyphs associated with a certain symbol. For instance, "F", "F", "F", "F", "F", and "F" are all different glyphs, but use the same character. The various modifiers (bold, italic, underline, color, and font) do not change the F's essential F-ness.

A character set contains the characters necessary to allow a particular human to carry on a meaningful interaction with the computer. It does not specify how those characters are represented in a computer. This level is the first one to separate characters into various alphabets (Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, and so on) or ideographic groups (Chinese, Korean, and so on). It corresponds to a "character repertoire" in the Unicode encoding model.

Code page 858

Code page 858 (also known as CP 858, IBM 00858, OEM 858) is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Western European languages.

Code page 858 was created from code page 850 in 1998 by changing code point 213 (D5_hex) from dotless i ‹ı› to the euro sign ‹€›.

Still, instead of adding support for the new code page 858, IBM's PC DOS 2000, also released in 1998, changed the definition of the existing code page 850 to what IBM called modified code page 850 to include the euro sign at code point 213. More recent IBM products implemented codepage 858 under its own ID.

Code page layout

The following table shows code page 858. Each character is shown with its equivalent Unicode code point and its decimal code point. Only the second half of the table (code points 128–255) is shown, the first half (code points 0–127) being the same as ASCII; although code points 1–31 and 127 (00–1F_hex and 7F_hex) have a different interpretation in some circumstances – see code page 437.

Notes

EBCDIC 037

IBM code page 37 is an EBCDIC code page with the full Latin-1 character set used in IBM mainframes. It is used in some English and Portuguese speaking countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, South Africa, and the United States.

CCSID 1140 is the Euro currency update of code page/CCSID 37. In that code page, the "¤" (currency sign) character at code point 9F is replaced with the "€" (Euro sign) character.

Codepage layout

Characters are shown with their Unicode equivalents.

Code page translation

Since CP 037 contains all of the standard Latin-1 characters, it is possible to translate the character codes from the CP 037 charset to ISO 8859-1 character codes, so that translation back to the CP 037 charset is an exact value-preserving round-trip conversion. Likewise, half of the control character codes can be translated into their exact ASCII equivalents. If the remaining EBCDIC-only control characters are translated (arbitrarily) into the remaining unused ASCII codes points (hex 80 to 9F) as well, the resulting translation covers all of the 256 character code points. Such a translation table is shown below: