Code Pages

The default OEM character set for DOS applications includes an extensive range of line drawing characters, but does not include a full set of diacritical (accented) characters as used in non-English languages. To cope with these characters, the OEM character set is split in two. The first half of the character set is constant, but the second half can be substituted with a number of alternative character sets called code pages. The exact character available at a particular character position depends on which code page is active at the time.

You can find out which code page is active by typing the DOS command chcp. You can change the active code page using the DOS commands mode or chcp.

For example:

mode con codepage prepare=((850) C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\ega.cpi)
mode con codepage select=850
chcp 850

The most commonly used code pages are:

• 437 for English in the United States of America
• 850 (commonly called Multilingual or Latin I) for most languages, including International English, that use the Latin alphabet
• 852 (commonly called Latin II) for Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet