Code page 850

Code page 850 is a code page used under DOS operating systems in Western Europe. Depending on the country setting and system configuration, code page 850 is the primary code page and default OEM code page in many countries, including various English-speaking locales, whilst other English-speaking locales default to the hardware code page 437.
Code page 850 differs from code page 437 in that many of the box-drawing characters, Greek letters, and various symbols were replaced with additional Latin letters with diacritics, thus greatly improving support for Western European languages. At the same time, the changes frequently caused display glitches with programs that made use of the box-drawing characters to display a GUI-like surface in text mode.
After the DOS era, successor operating systems largely replaced code page 850 with Windows-1252, later UCS-2 and UTF-16, and finally UTF-8. However, legacy applications, especially command-line programs, may still depend on support for older code pages.

Character set

Each non-ASCII character appears with its equivalent Unicode code-point. Differences from code page 437 are limited to the second half of the table, the first half being the same.

Code page 858

In 1998, code page 858 was derived from this code page by changing code point 213 from a dotless i to the euro sign . Unlike most code pages modified to support the euro sign, the generic currency sign at CF_hex was not chosen as the character to replace, code pages 808, 848, 849 and 872, ISO-IR-205, ISO-IR-206.
IBM's PC DOS 2000, also released in 1998, just changed the definition of 850 to match 858 and called it modified code page 850. This was done so programs that hard-coded 850 would be able to use the Euro sign. There may also have been a problem with Code Page Information files being limited to about six codepages maximum. More recent IBM/MS products implement codepage 858 under its own ID and have restored 850 to the original.