How does Windows-1252 differ from ISO-8859-1?

They are identical for byte values 0x00 to 0x7F and 0xA0 to 0xFF. The difference is the 0x80 to 0x9F range, which Latin-1 leaves as control codes but Windows-1252 fills with printable characters like the euro sign, em dash, and curly quotes.

Why does my text turn into mojibake?

If text was saved as Windows-1252 but read as ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8, the 0x80 to 0x9F bytes are misinterpreted. A curly quote becomes a stray symbol or a question-mark box. Knowing the actual CP1252 bytes helps you diagnose and fix the mismatch.

What does a dash in the output mean?

A dash means the character has no Windows-1252 byte. CP1252 is a single-byte encoding covering only 256 values, so characters like emoji or most non-Western scripts cannot be represented and are flagged rather than guessed.

Is Windows-1252 the same as ANSI?

In Microsoft software, ANSI usually refers to the active code page, which on Western Windows installations is Windows-1252. The term ANSI is misleading, but in practice it most often means CP1252 in English-language environments.

When should I still care about CP1252?

Plenty of legacy files, exports, and Windows applications still emit CP1252. When you import that data into a UTF-8 world you must know it is CP1252 to decode it correctly, which is what this dump helps you confirm.

Windows-1252 Hex Dump

Windows-1252 is the encoding behind countless mojibake bugs. This tool dumps the exact CP1252 byte for every character so you can see precisely how text like smart quotes and the euro sign is stored — and why it breaks when misread.

How it works

Windows-1252 is a single-byte encoding. For most of its range it matches ISO-8859-1 exactly, so the mapping is trivial:

0x00–0x7F : same as ASCII
0xA0–0xFF : same as ISO-8859-1
0x80–0x9F : CP1252-specific printable characters

The crucial part is that 0x80–0x9F range. Where Latin-1 reserves those bytes for control codes, CP1252 reuses them for €, –, —, “, ”, ™ and other common symbols. The tool maps each character through this table; characters with no CP1252 byte are shown with a dash.

Tips and notes

The euro sign € is byte 0x80 in CP1252 but does not exist in Latin-1 — a classic source of broken imports.
Curly quotes (“ ” ‘ ’) and the em dash (—) live in the special range, so text from Microsoft Word often needs CP1252-aware handling.
A dash in the dump tells you the character is outside CP1252 entirely and would need UTF-8 to represent.