Concept

Character encoding

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Windows code page

Windows code pages are sets of characters or code pages (known as character encodings in other operating systems) used in Microsoft Windows from the 1980s and 1990s. Windows code pages were gradually superseded when Unicode was implemented in Windows, although they are still supported both within Windows and other platforms, and still apply when Alt code shortcuts are used. There are two groups of system code pages in Windows systems: OEM and Windows-native ("ANSI") code pages. (ANSI is the American National Standards Institute.

Dollar sign

The dollar sign, also known as peso sign, is a currency symbol consisting of a capital "S" crossed with one or two vertical strokes (

or depending on typeface), used to indicate the unit of various currencies around the world, including most currencies denominated "peso" and "dollar". The explicitly double-barred sign is called cifrão in Portuguese. The sign is also used in several compound currency symbols, such as the Brazilian real (R

) and the United States dollar (US$): in local use, the nationality prefix is usually omitted.

Space (punctuation)

In writing, a space () is a blank area that separates words, sentences, syllables (in syllabification) and other written or printed glyphs (characters). Conventions for spacing vary among languages, and in some languages the spacing rules are complex. Inter-word spaces ease the reader's task of identifying words, and avoid outright ambiguities such as "now here" vs. "nowhere". They also provide convenient guides for where a human or program may start new lines.

Alt code

On personal computers with numeric keypads that use Microsoft operating systems, such as Windows, many characters that do not have a dedicated key combination on the keyboard may nevertheless be entered using the Alt code (the Alt numpad input method). This is done by pressing and holding the key, then typing a number on the keyboard's numeric keypad that identifies the character and then releasing . On IBM PC compatible personal computers from the 1980s, the BIOS allowed the user to hold down the key and type a decimal number on the keypad.

Null character

The null character (also null terminator) is a control character with the value zero. It is present in many character sets, including those defined by the Baudot and ITA2 codes, ISO/IEC 646 (or ASCII), the C0 control code, the Universal Coded Character Set (or Unicode), and EBCDIC. It is available in nearly all mainstream programming languages. It is often abbreviated as NUL (or NULL, though in some contexts that term is used for the null pointer). In 8-bit codes, it is known as a null byte.

Shift Out and Shift In characters

Shift Out (SO) and Shift In (SI) are ASCII control characters 14 and 15, respectively (0x0E and 0x0F). These are sometimes also called "Control-N" and "Control-O". The original purpose of these characters was to provide a way to shift a coloured ribbon, split longitudinally usually with red and black, up and down to the other colour in an electro-mechanical typewriter or teleprinter, such as the Teletype Model 38, to automate the same function of manual typewriters.

Hyphen-minus

The hyphen-minus is the most commonly used type of hyphen, widely used in digital documents. In ASCII or on most keyboards it is the only character that resembles a minus sign or a dash so it is also used for these. The name "hyphen-minus" derives from the original ASCII standard, where it was called "hyphen (minus)". The character is referred to as a "hyphen", a "minus sign", or a "dash" according to the context where it is being used.

IJ (digraph)

IJ (lowercase ij; ɛi; also encountered as deprecated codepoints IJ and ij) is a digraph of the letters i and j. Occurring in the Dutch language, it is sometimes considered a ligature, or a letter in itself. In most fonts that have a separate character for ij, the two composing parts are not connected but are separate glyphs, which are sometimes slightly kerned. An ij in written Dutch usually represents the diphthong [ɛi]. In standard Dutch and most Dutch dialects, there are two possible spellings for the diphthong [ɛi]: ij and ei.