Wednesday, 26 March 2025

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

↑ The reason for this might have been down to existing restrictions in the implementation of the codepage switching logic under MS-DOS/PC DOS, which limited .CPI files to 64 KB in size or about six codepages maximum, a limitation, which was circumvented in some OEM versions of MS-DOS, in Windows NT, and also does not exist in DR-DOS. Further, the parser in MS-DOS/PC DOS limits the number of possible country / codepage entries in COUNTRY.SYS files to a maximum of 146 or 438, a limitation non-existent in DR-DOS. So, adding support for codepage 858 might have meant to drop another (e.g. codepage 850) at the same time, which might not have been a viable solution at that time, given that some applications were hard-wired to use codepage 850.

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Code page 858

Code page layout

Notes

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