Code Page Families

Today, with many available languages, scripts, operating systems, and vendors, the number of code pages has greatly increased. There are now several hundred code pages in use. The following summary will help you understand the organization of code pages.

Code pages are organized in families and are platform specific. There are separate families of code pages for each operating system.

The major code page families used by Information Builders products are:

• Microsoft Windows code pages.
• UNIX code pages. These code pages include the ISO 8859-x set, which is similar to Microsoft Windows code pages.
• IBM EBCDIC code pages. These code pages are used for platforms such as IBM z/OS and IBM i.
• DOS ASCII code pages. These code pages are intended for the original, pre-Windows, IBM-compatible PC-DOS operating system. They are increasingly obsolete, but are used for legacy applications.

The underlying code page of your computer operating environment is determined by the language in which the operating system is generated. This code page is compatible with your operating system and its locale (language/country) setting.

Finally, the ANSI code page is extremely useful. It is the operating system code page for Windows and UNIX in Western Europe, North America, and South America. Information Builders has developed code page 137, which is functionally equivalent to Microsoft Windows 1252 and UNIX ISO 8859-1 code pages. Code page 137 handles all major North American, South American, and Western European languages (except Greek) for Windows and UNIX. Since Release 7.7, however, code page 1252 has been used as the default for ASCII platforms.