XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Cp1252

The most common platform-dependent character set, and the one you’re most likely to encounter on the Internet, is Cp1252, also (and incorrectly) known as Windows ANSI . This is the default character set used by most American and Western European Windows PCs, which explains its ubiquity. Cp1252 is a single-byte character set almost identical to the standard ISO-8859-1 character set—indeed, many Cp1252 documents are often incorrectly labeled as being Latin-1 documents. However, this set replaces the C1 controls between code points 128 and 159 with additional graphics characters, such as ‰, ‡, and Ÿ. These characters won’t cause problems on other Windows systems. However, other platforms will have difficulty viewing them properly and may even crash in extreme cases. Cp1252 (and its siblings used in non-Western Windows systems) should be avoided.