Windows-1252
| MIME / IANA | windows-1252 |
|---|---|
| Alias(es) | cp1252 (code page 1252) |
| Language(s) | All supported by ISO/IEC 8859-1 plus full support for French and Finnish and ligature forms for English; e.g. Danish (except for a rare exceptional letter), Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, German (missing uppercase ẞ), Icelandic, Faroese, Luxembourgish, Albanian, Estonian, Swahili, Tswana, Catalan, Basque, Occitan, Rotokas, Toki Pona, Lojban, Romansh, Dutch (except the IJ/ij character, substituted by IJ/ij or ÿ), and Slovene (except the č character, substituted by ç). Some languages lack their standard quotation marks (such as German „quotes“). |
| Created by | Microsoft |
| Standard | WHATWG Encoding Standard |
| Classification | extended ASCII, Windows-125x |
| Extends | ISO 8859-1 (excluding C1 controls) |
| Transforms / Encodes | ISO 8859-15 |
| Succeeded by | Unicode (UTF-8, UTF-16) |
Windows-1252 or CP-1252 (Windows code page 1252) is a legacy single-byte character encoding that is used by default (as the "ANSI code page") in Microsoft Windows throughout the Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and much of Africa.
Initially the same as ISO 8859-1, it began to diverge starting in Windows 2.0 by adding additional characters in the 0x80 to 0x9F (hex) range (the ISO standards reserve this range for C1 control codes). Notable additional characters include curly quotation marks and all printable characters from ISO 8859-15.
It is the most-used single-byte character encoding in the world. Although almost all websites now use the multi-byte character encoding UTF-8, as of April 2025, 1.1% of websites declared ISO 8859-1 which is treated as Windows-1252 by all modern browsers (as required by the HTML5 standard), plus 0.3% declared Windows-1252 directly, for a total of 1.4%. Some countries or languages show a higher usage than the global average, in 2025 Brazil according to website use, use is at 2.9%, and in Germany at 2.4% (these are the sums of ISO-8859-1 and CP-1252 declarations).