Windows-1258 is a

code page In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a single byte. (In some c ...

used in

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

to represent Vietnamese texts. It makes use of

combining diacritical mark In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks (including combining accents). Unicode al ...

s. Windows-1258 is compatible with neither the Vietnamese standard ( TCVN 5712 / VSCII), nor the various other encodings in use in practice ( VISCII,

VNI VNI Software Company is a developer of various education, entertainment, office, and utility computer software, software packages. They are known for developing an Character encoding, encoding (VNI encoding) and a popular input method (VNI Input) ...

, VPS). Rather, it is very similar to

Windows-1252 Windows-1252 or CP-1252 ( code page 1252) is a single-byte character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows for English and many European languages including Spanish, French, and German. ...

, with the differences being that s-caron and z-caron (which were added to Windows-1252 later) are missing, five of the letters with diacritics have been replaced by combining diacritics for Vietnamese tone marks, one has been replaced with the đông sign, and eight others (four per case) have been changed to four otherwise-unsupported Vietnamese letters. Use of combining diacritics means that Windows-1258 can cover the large number of combinations of letters and tone marks in Vietnamese without compromising coverage of control codes or symbols. However it also means that software must be careful to handle conversions between precomposed characters and combining sequences correctly when converting to/from other encodings and makes determining user-visible length of a string more difficult. IBM uses code page 1258 (

CCSID A CCSID (coded character set identifier) is a 16-bit number that represents a particular encoding of a specific code page. For example, Unicode is a code page that has several encoding (so called "transformation") forms, like UTF-8, UTF-16 and U ...

1258 and

euro sign The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone and unilaterally adopted by Kosovo and Montenegro. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consists o ...

extended CCSID 5354) for Windows-1258.

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of e ...

is the preferred encoding for Vietnamese in modern applications. Windows-1258 may not always round-trip Unicode encoded Vietnamese due to changes caused by

Unicode normalization Unicode equivalence is the specification by the Unicode character encoding standard that some sequences of code points represent essentially the same character. This feature was introduced in the standard to allow compatibility with preexisting ...

. Combining diacritics are encoded after the letter in both Windows-1258 and Unicode (like

, unlike

ANSEL ANSEL, the American National Standard for Extended Latin Alphabet Coded Character Set for Bibliographic Use, was a character set used in text encoding. It provided a table of coded values for the representation of characters of the extended Latin ...

Character set

The following table shows Windows-1258. Each character is shown with its

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

equivalent.

Code page 1129

IBM's code page 1129 (

1129 and

extended CCSID 1163) is similar to code page 1258, but with the following differences:

References

External links

IANA Charset Name Registration of windows-1258Michael Kaplan's blog describing the Windows 1258 encoding behavior
{{Character encodings Windows code pages

Character set

Code page 1129

See also

References

External links