charset for spanish windows

Question

what is the charset for spanish windows?

Answer 1

Spanish (es) iso-8859-1, windows-1252

Answer 2

The only correct, acceptable character set nowadays is the Universal Character Set (UCS), and the only correct, acceptable encodings are Unicode Transformation Formats (UTF).

One of the worst misfeatures Windows has is a silly notion of a locale having several character sets and encodings associated to it: an 8-bit legacy so-called "OEM" character set that comes from the DOS days, an 8-bit legacy so-called "ANSI" character set that comes from the early Windows days, and so-called "wide character" UTF-16 Little-Endian, which is what Windows supports when applications are "Unicode". While the former so-called "OEM" thing is left for DOS applications, most of the Windows API is annoyingly duplicated with "A" (ANSI) functions and W (wide char) functions.

In the case of the Spanish locale, the "OEM" character set is CP850, the "ANSI" character set is CP1252, and of course there's UTF-16 Little-Endian which is what you should be using.

My recommendation is that you avoid CP1252 and CP850 like the plague and use UTF-16LE, as well as develop your applications with Unicode semantics and conventions. Some applications also support UTF-8, which is more convenient for European languages.