Windows-1252

Byte Structure

When to Use Windows-1252

Sample Characters in Windows-1252

The table below shows how a selection of characters are represented in Windows-1252. Bytes are shown in hexadecimal. Characters marked "not supported" cannot be encoded in Windows-1252 and would need to be replaced or transliterated when converting from Unicode.

Working with Windows-1252 in Code

Every major language has built-in support for encoding conversion. The examples below show how to encode a string to Windows-1252 bytes and decode it back to a Unicode string. Always specify the encoding explicitly — never rely on system defaults, which vary by OS and locale.

# Encode a string to windows-1252 bytes
text = "Hello, 世界"
encoded = text.encode("windows-1252")

# Decode bytes back to a string
decoded = encoded.decode("windows-1252")

// Convert to windows-1252
$bytes = mb_convert_encoding(
    "Hello, 世界",
    "windows-1252",
    "UTF-8"
);

// Convert back to UTF-8
$text = mb_convert_encoding(
    $bytes,
    "UTF-8",
    "windows-1252"
);

// Encode to windows-1252 bytes
const encoder = new TextEncoder(); // UTF-8
const bytes = encoder.encode("Hello, 世界");

// Decode bytes
const decoder = new TextDecoder("windows-1252");
const text = decoder.decode(bytes);

-- Create a database with Windows-1252
CREATE DATABASE mydb
  ENCODING 'windows-1252'
  LC_COLLATE 'en_US.UTF-8';

-- Check database encoding
SELECT pg_encoding_to_char(encoding)
FROM pg_database
WHERE datname = current_database();

Compare with Other Encodings

See how Windows-1252 differs from other encodings — which characters each supports and how the byte representations compare.