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This character encoding is a superset of ISO 8859-1 in terms of printable characters, but differs from the IANA's ISO-8859-1 by using displayable characters rather than control characters in the 80 to 9F (hex) range. Notable additional characters include curly quotation marks and all the printable characters that are in ISO 8859-15. It is known to Windows by the code page number 1252, and by the IANA-approved name "windows-1252".

It is very common to mislabel Windows-1252 text with the charset label ISO-8859-1. A common result was that all the quotes and apostrophes (produced by "smart quotes" in word-processing software) were replaced with question marks or boxes on non-Windows operating systems, making text difficult to read. Most modern web browsers and e-mail clients treat the media type charset ISO-8859-1 as Windows-1252 to accommodate such mislabeling. This is now standard behavior in the HTML5 specification, which requires that documents advertised as ISO-8859-1 actually be parsed with the Windows-1252 encoding.[1] As of November 2016[update], 0.9% of all web sites used Windows-1252,[2][3] but at the same time 5.7% used ISO 8859-1,[2] which by HTML5 standards should be considered the same encoding, so that 6.6% of web sites effectively used Windows-1252.

Historically, the phrase "ANSI Code Page" (ACP) is used in Windows to refer to various code pages considered as native. The intention was that most of these would be ANSI standards such as ISO-8859-1. Even though Windows-1252 was the first and by far most popular code page named so in Microsoft Windows parlance, the code page has never been an ANSI standard. Microsoft explains, "The term ANSI as used to signify Windows code pages is a historical reference, but is nowadays a misnomer that continues to persist in the Windows community."[4]

The following table shows Windows-1252. Each character is shown with its Unicode equivalent and its decimal code. Conversions to Unicode are based on the Unicode.org mapping of Windows-1252 with "best fit".[5]

According to the information on Microsoft's and the Unicode Consortium's websites, positions 81, 8D, 8F, 90, and 9D are unused; however, the Windows API MultiByteToWideChar maps these to the corresponding C1 control codes. The "best fit" mapping documents this behavior, too.[5]

The first version of the codepage 1252 used in Microsoft Windows 1.0 did not have positions D7 and F7 defined. All the characters in the ranges 80-90 and 93-9F (i.e. except ‘ and ’) were undefined too.

The second version, used in Microsoft Windows 2.0, positions D7 and F7 had been defined.

The third version, used since Microsoft Windows 3.1, had all the present-day positions defined, except Euro sign and Z with caron character pair.