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The number typed and its resulting character correspond to two different Character Set s.
  • Without leading zero. If the number typed is not preceded by a zero, the character resulting from this number corresponds to Code Page 850 (also known as ''Multilingual (Latin-1)''), an Extended ASCII code page, allowing 8-bit = 256 different characters. Most notably, this codepage allows the input of graphical characters instead of the C0 Control Codes (values 1 - 31), such as {☺, ☻, ♥, ♦, ♣, ♠}, pressing Alt + {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}, respectively (these characters can only be seen in the Windows GUI, not in the Cmd.exe . For a full list of these graphical characters, see '' Code Page 437 '', for the remaining characters, see '' Code Page 850 ).

  • With leading zero. If the number typed is preceded by a zero, the character resulting from this number corresponds to Windows-1252 , another Extended ASCII code page, belonging to the group of Windows Code Page s, which are sometimes confusingly named ''Windows ANSI code pages''. Most notably, this codepage allows the input of C0 control codes, such as the { Bell Character , Backspace , Tab }, pressing Alt + {07, 08, 09}, respectively (for a full list of the typable characters, see '' Windows-1252 '').


As both character sets are based on the traditional 7-bit ASCII , the characters for values between 32 and 126 are the same. For values above 126, they differ mostly.

Due to the character sets's ASCII fundament and Microsoft's confusing policy to name its character sets after ANSI , many people tend to name Windows Alt keycodes either ''ASCII codes'' or ''ANSI codes''.

Interestingly to note is that for values above 255, both code pages start at 0 again. For every natural number ''n'', ''Alt + {0} (n × 256 + cpnumber)'' leads to the same character as ''Alt + cpnumber''. Typing Alt + 137 leads to ë, as does Alt + 393 (137 + 256).
  • 10000).



MORE EXAMPLES

Code pages 850 use code point 151 for the lowercase ''u'' with grave accent (ù). Typing Alt+151 on a Windows machine will produces this character.
When preferring Windows-1252 instead, one has to type Alt+0249 to get the same character, as 249 is character ù 's position in Windows-1252.


TABLE OF CHARACTERS

The pages linked from this article provide the list of characters indexed using Hexadecimal numbers. In actual use, decimal numbers are required, as listed here.